Gqrx is a graphical tool that visualizes radio signals in the spectrum. One of the easiest applications is, to tune to the frequency of a local FM or AM radio station and listen to the music. Assuming that you followed the airplane tracking tutorial, the installation is simple.
1. Run each line separately to add the repositories that are required:
sudo add-apt-repository -y ppa:bladerf/bladerf
sudo add-apt-repository -y ppa:myriadrf/drivers
sudo add-apt-repository -y ppa:myriadrf/gnuradio
sudo add-apt-repository -y ppa:gqrx/gqrx-sdr
sudo apt-get update
2. Install the program:
sudo apt-get install gqrx-sdr
3. Now, you can run the program with
gqrx-sdr
or by clicking on it in the startmenu-section internet. The first time you run it, you need to select an input device. For me it was the recommended one. In the window under ‘file>Start DSP’ you can start the waterfall and the audio.
It’s school vacation time and I hear a lot of planes passing by, when I am in the garden. This reminded me of a project for the Rtl-Sdr, that I saw a while ago. I could track the ADS-B signals of aircrafts to mark their position on a map. And this all can be done in minutes!
Required hardware:
– 1x Pine A64 with power adaptor and wifi module or ethernet
– 1x MicroSD 16 GB
– 1x MicroSD to usb adaptor (to plug microSD into PC)
– 1x RTL-SDR (DVB-T Dongle with the RTL2832U Chip)
Preparation of Armbian:
1. Download the Armbian operating system with desktop (right one).
2. Unpack it until you see a .img file (e.g. with 7-Zip).
3. Plug-in the microSD with an adaptor and write the .img on it with Win32DiskImager. Select the .img file as image and the usb adaptor as medium.
4. Put the microSD back into the Pine and connect an usb-mouse and -keyboard as well as an hdmi display. Now connect the power and let it boot.
5. Log in with the user “root” and password “1234”. You are forced to change the password and create a new standard user. Then, you will see the desktop. SSH starts automatically, so you can access the terminal from another pc (e.g. with Putty).
Install the RTL-SDR dongle:
1. Open the terminal and run
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade
.
2. Plug in the RTL-SDR dongle and run:
lsusb
. You should now see the dongle in the list. For me it looks like this:
Bus 001 Device 003: ID 0bda:2838 Realtek Semiconductor Corp. RTL2838 DVB-T.
In my case “0bda” is the vendor identification and “2838” is the product number.
You need to insert the vendor id and product number of your device if it is different than my example. This should ensure that the rtl-sdr is accessible by the pine. Now shutdown with
sudo halt
and then start it again (the reboot command can cause problems).
4. Run ‘sudo apt-get install librtlsdr-dev’ to install the development package for rtl-sdr.
5. Install two more packages:
sudo apt-get install pkg-config build-essential
6. Download the plane tracking program Dump1090 from Github:
9. Now, you will see the raw data. If you want to get a neat map with all the planes around you, open the browser on any pc in the network and go to “IP of Pine64”:8080. You can see your IP with
ifconfig
. The map might be watermarked, but you can get a free API code in the Google Console. Then, open the gmap file: ‘sudo nano ~/dump1090/public_html/gmap.html’. Insert the following line before the
