The Prepper Broadcasting Network - Matter of Facts: Into the Weird World of SDR

Episode Date: April 7, 2025

http://www.mofpodcast.com/www.pbnfamily.comhttps://www.facebook.com/matteroffactspodcast/https://www.facebook.com/groups/mofpodcastgroup/https://rumble.com/user/Mofpodcastwww.youtube.com/user/philrabhttps://www.instagram.com/mofpodcasthttps://twitter.com/themofpodcasthttps://www.instagram.com/cypress_survivalist/https://www.facebook.com/CypressSurvivalistSupport the showMerch at: https://southerngalscrafts.myshopify.com/Shop at Amazon: http://amzn.to/2ora9riPatreon: https://www.patreon.com/mofpodcastPurchase American Insurgent by Phil Rabalais: https://amzn.to/2FvSLMLShop at MantisX: http://www.mantisx.com/ref?id=173*The views and opinions of guests do not reflect the opinions of Phil Rabalais, Andrew Bobo, Nic Emricson, or the Matter of Facts Podcast****NOTE*** You may benefit from watching the stream on YouTube, Facebook, or Rumble (linked above) to see the software in action for the full experience. Phil's recent Commo class for Cypress Survivalist left him wondering what else he could fit into a topic, for show attendees and for his faithful audience. Down the rabbit hole he went into the land of SDR, or Software Defined Radio. The magical crossection of abandonware, software geek passion projects, and radio nerdism left him with a few more nuggets to add to his Signals Intelligence repetoire, and will make for a chaotic (but hopefully informative) show and tell. More info at https://www.rtl-sdr.com/Matter of Facts is now live-streaming our podcast on our YouTube channel, Facebook page, and Rumble. See the links above, join in the live chat, and see the faces behind the voices. Intro and Outro Music by Phil Rabalais All rights reserved, no commercial or non-commercial use without permission of creator prepper, prep, preparedness, prepared, emergency, survival, survive, self defense, 2nd amendment, 2a, gun rights, constitution, individual rights, train like you fight, firearms training, medical training, matter of facts podcast, mof podcast, reloading, handloading, ammo, ammunition, bullets, magazines, ar-15, ak-47, cz 75, cz, cz scorpion, bugout, bugout bag, get home bag, military, tactical 

Welcome back to the Matterfags Podcast on the Prepper Broadcasting Network. We talk prepping guns politics every week on iTunes, Stitcher, and Spotify. Go check out our content at MWFpodcast.com on Facebook or Instagram. You can support us via Patreon or by checking out our affiliate partners. I'm your host Phil Raveley. Andrew and Nick are on the other side of the mic and here's your show. Welcome back to the Matterfax podcast. I am once again coming to you to announce that Andrew is not with us. He has joined the Botswana Defense Force, a country so tiny and obscure.

I didn't think it had a defense force, but Nick, my other co host, googled it and apparently they do which I'm not sure that makes you pretty quality one. I'm not sure yet if that makes the joke funnier or less funny. I think it adds something to it. It does. I think it's I think it's so I guess that that means the next week is back on me to come up with an excuse for Andrew not being here and it must be something embarrassing. Yes, I did outstanding. RaggleFraggle is in the in the chat. Apparently he's been there since 5 p.m.

so let's do these things out of order and then we'll get back to the admin work. So if you're listening or watching this Streaming live there's an explanation for what's going on. So I Have had a change in my work schedule that is going to make our usual five o'clock 5 p.m Central time record, you know recording time almost impossible to reliably hit and rather than roll the dice and press Nick into service, having to tell jokes and do a stand-up routine to wait for me,

we opted to back it up till after dinner instead of before dinner. This comes with one other unfortunate change. So this podcast streams on YouTube, Facebook, and Rumble. It rebroadcasts on the Prepper Broadcasting Network, and it has always been an audio podcast. So it's on all of your favorite podcast apps, like Potamatic and Spotify and iTunes and yada yada yada. We've been releasing consistently on Friday morning

for ever, like literally for like nine, almost nine years now and that's gonna have to change so the audio podcast if that's how you like to listen to this anywhere but PBN because PBN is going to continue to be on Monday but everywhere else this is going to start releasing Saturday morning because if we're gonna record this late in the evening quite frankly I need to be able to like record stop, stop, drop and roll and then get to bed at a reasonable hour so I can get to work the next morning because

I wake up at 4am. Yeah, 430 here. Yeah. So, you know, just one of those things where like, sometimes this editing job is pretty quick and simple and sometimes frankly, it's hell on earth and it takes me two and a half, three hours. It just depends on how things work out and in the interest of not making it hell on earth at midnight I'm gonna make this a Friday afternoon job where I record where

I edit this and get it posted for Saturday morning so for the patrons y'all y'all gave me your approval and I thank you for that. And this is my moment to plug the patrons. All of you sociopaths, chip in a couple of bucks a month and it helps to fray the cost so that I don't have to make this a line out. I've been the Rabelais family budget and I'm very appreciative of that.

And because of that, I asked the patrons who were all in the Signal Chat together, do y'all care? And they said, no. Yep. And so everybody that's not a patron, they pay the bills they get they get the last word. Sorry, that's just the way it works. Well, I think we get the last word they get a vote. Yeah. That bring

let me do the admin work and then we'll loop back around to that go for it. So I've already said thank you to the patrons. There's links to merchant in the merch down in the show description. If you want to support the show, get a shirt or a koozie. You should check that out. And Cypher Survivalist is still the thing that we're doing down here in Southeast Louisiana to promote the preparedness culture. We have some things that are in the works. I've got a board meeting tomorrow that we're going to hopefully hammer down a list of action items. And then I'll be able to like bring some cool stuff out in the near future about that. But going back to this idea that like, we have the last word, like y'all have

to understand that like my perspective on this podcast for years has always been like, I do it because the audience shows up. Yeah, if the audience is showing up, it's not funny anymore. And I don't want to do this anymore. I certainly don't do it for money. I certainly don't do for paycheck. And contrary to popular belief, micro internet celebrities not really a thing. Like, I don't, I don't walk around town and people are like, Hey, that's the dude I did that no one knows who I am. And I like that to a degree.

Yeah, I get that man. But you know, long way in a way of saying that like, I do this for the audience, I do this for the patrons and that's why I went to the patrons and genuinely asked like if that if if the show coming out on Saturday was cause a heartburn, I'll suck it up and keep making it come out on Friday no matter what it takes. It'll hurt it'll suck but I would do it because I do it because the audience and the patrons ask me to. I understand that, but you got to take care of yourself and you got to accommodate your work schedule and your life schedule. And man, if that meant you being up for midnight

doing editing work, I don't think anybody would blame you. I mean, I've stayed up much later doing much less fun things. So I'm sure there is that but you know You're not doing it once a week every week for the foreseeable future There's a difference. There's a difference between sucking up something a couple of times and Doing it every Thursday night from now until whenever ever yeah, I from now until whenever ever yeah I'll say is that if the patrons would have like put the foot down on my neck I would have done it oh I know you would have but they said Saturday was cool and I am appreciative of that because it

means that I can get some sleep you know for all you that are on the other side of 40 I'm gonna tell you that you on the other side of 40, I'm going to tell you that, you know, when we're young, we have this mentality like I don't need sleep. I just need coffee. I could stay up. I can like survive on three hours of sleep forever. I can party all night, drag my button, work the next morning. Let me tell you something.

When you get just to this side of 40 a switch flips and things start changing and I don't know quite why but I do know that I tell my wife frequently I can do everything now that I could 10 years ago but it hurts a lot worse the next day. Like I can still jack up a jack up her Jeep rip all the brakes off of it do a whole break job I can do all that I'm I've still got my you know, my hands and my physical ability, and I've still got all my strength. But boy, I'm gonna tell you the next day, I got up out of bed, and I was

limping around the house, like my back was not happy with me. And I was like, Ooh, ooh, maybe maybe, maybe get into that point where paying somebody to do it may not be like, you know, the worst thing on earth. I mean, I'd be humiliated as a man, but still, hey, you know what, man, we all got to do it may not be like you know the worst thing on earth I mean I'd be humiliated as a man but still hey you know what man we all gotta suck it up sometimes right yeah raggle fraggle let me tell you something it is not the age it is the mileage some of us some of us have led very very interesting lives and our bodies are now telling us all about it yeah there's stuff that probably should have gotten looked at a few years back. But yeah, no, man, I'm you get up

at 430 in the morning to get to work every day. You're not staying up late. Your body's just not gonna want to do it. Yes, yes. All right. So admin work done to topics. A couple of weeks ago, this is what we call foreshadowing in the business. I made some lopsided comment about, wow, I sure hope there's another Trump slump and everybody slacks off on buying guns and ammo and I can use them in like a year or so. I can start loading up my reloading cabinet again I can start buying ammo on the cheap because no ever is gonna be like yay

second amendment safe like they do every time a Republican gets into office and then today one of y'all posted this in the patron group that Trump's tariffs are impacting foreign ammunition manufacturers oh yeah, yeah. Yeah, I know, I know, I know. Just. I mean, like, okay, like. Did anybody really not expect that to be affected? I saw it coming, but I didn't need the knife twisted. Like y'all could have just let me continue on in my ignorance.

But like, this is a phenomenal example of why I have said consistently year after year after year after year no matter who is going to win the election. All of y'all out there ought to be stacking ammo because every time we get it we get to like to within this much of that November ammunition prices start going up for reasons. Everybody gets a little nervous and all of a sudden things start getting scarce on the shelves and then depending on which way the election goes, sometimes everybody's like, huh, and then ammunition floods back in the shelves and gets cheap or it goes, ah, and freaks out and ammunition doubles in price for the

next couple of years. Yeah. So like this isn't completely unexpected, but damn it is an aggravate. Well, look, any anytime a government imposes new tariffs or new taxes, especially if it's on raw materials or any kind of foreign imports, it's going to hit ammo prices because to be honest, brass is expensive. Lead is expensive. The chemicals that go into primers are expensive

Congrats and you've now added a premium on top of that So I have to address this ragel fraggle said he just saw primers for forty five dollars a brick though now You better go buy a couple of those right now because Unfortunately, what always happens in the animation manufacturing business you have to understand that like there's a lot. There's only so many places Well, not just that but like there's only so many places in the world that make powder for example Like all of your gun powders, they're not made by guys with big luxurious beards in their garage. They're made in frickin refineries Places like do you know names like Dupont Yep, large refineries ideally located very far from cities.

Yes. But my point is that there's only so many places in the world they make powder, they make a huge run of powder and then they turn they do a turnaround and they make another huge run of a different kind of powder with slightly different characteristics. That is why shortages on your your personal pet powder can last sometimes for half a year because congrats you happen to hit the tail end of that batch. I haven't found my personal pet pistol powder in seven years. I bought so much off of a dead guy that I have not had to buy powder in 10 years.

Yeah. Now don't get it twisted. I've still got half of that eight pound jug and I have plenty of other stuff. I can press and service alone nine mil. I mean, this is a beautiful thing about loading pistol rounds is that when you, when you have like a little, little huge of like four and a half grains of powder in your case, eight pounds last a long time. But my point is, is that six loads or 300 wind mag loads. Yeah. And that's also, but this is the reason why recently not, not just the cost of primers, the cost of primers, the difficulty finding powders I want. I've gotten to the point where it is with the cost and the time investment and the time investment is becoming more of an issue now.

Because when I first started down the reloading road, when I first started down the preparedness road, I was really heavy in on firearms. And since then I have like really diverse, I mean, obviously I have diversified myself, that's the primary topic, but I've stuck my nose in all these different little facets of preparedness

And as a result of that my time is split in a bunch of different directions now I don't have hours upon hours to sit in the garage and just load nine millimeter It serves me no purpose. I'd rather go buy thousand rounds of it And you know a penny around more than what it would cost me to reload it and save the time. Like I was telling somebody recently at this point, I would reload ammo is something I couldn't buy. I have a couple of I have a couple of pet loads. Can't buy them. Yep. Can't buy them anywhere for any amount of

money. I have to make them myself. I have a couple that they're published low data, but no one makes these cartridge and bullet combinations. I've got a 90 grain Hornady XTP, nine millimeter. Why? I see your brow ring. Why? Nick, do you know what happens when you take a 90 grain Hornady XTP hollow point and you zap it down the barrel at 1450 feet a second? Other than messing up your barrel due to extra barrel erosion? No.

Shot a bunch of through my barrel. Not only is that the most accurate round out of both of my CZs. Not only is it within Sammy specs for 9mm plus P, it is one of the most accurate loads out of a variety of 9mm pistols I've shot. Yes, it is a very, very light bullet and it's a very short stubby bullet. I mean, it's literally as tall as it is wide. Oh, yeah, it would have to be. I mean, it's it's literally as tall as it is wider. Oh, yeah, it would have to be

but 1,450 feet a second that is impressive when I was when I was doing load development for this thing Halfway through the powder charges. I heard it go supersonic And I kept pushing and pushing and pushing my normal well, and you might have had different experience than I have, but my experience with load development is usually that when you get to, as you go up in your charge weight, you normally hit a point where like your accuracy, your group shrinks, reach your most accurate point. And then to push past that, it starts widening out again, right? It depends on the cartridge and the weapons platform.

On rifles, I have noticed that a little bit. Once you get too fast with a rifle bullet for your twist rate, it becomes a problem. Not so much an issue with handgun rounds though, right? You know, I've never really pushed super high velocities with my handguns. Most of the time I go with heavier projectiles rather than lighter. So what I will tell you is that this round, the groups got tighter and tighter and tighter and tighter all the way to a max charge. And then the max charge was 1440 some feet per second over the chronograph.

It was, it's a weird round. It's a 380 ACP bullet. That's what I was thinking. But I found Low Dad afforded 9 mil and I love that little thing. It fits down the barrel if it fits its ships. But yeah. But here's the thing. I can't buy anywhere. Nobody makes it. Well, of course they don't. It's a 380 ACP round. I mean, I in reality it is. And for the same reason, nobody makes the 308 the match grade 308 round that I have it's tuned exactly to my barrel that will group in the end that will make four rounds touch at 100 yards. My own six, nobody makes a win mag. Yeah. So at this stage,

I'm in the mode of if I can't buy it off the store shelves I will make it sure but if I can buy it off the store shelves like if I just want a thousand rounds of five five six go plinking with I Have to start asking myself a dive start doing a cost-benefit analysis about Well five five six was always a hard a hard one to even break even on reloading Just just due to the the amount of powder that you end up going through and the projectiles aren't the cheapest i mean they're not expensive but unless you're buying them like 10 000 at a time you're really not getting any kind of bulk discount yeah and at that point to

make like to to make the the financial numbers on something like bulk five five six work you have to either not count your time as having any value which for most business does or you have to go get a progressive press and the minute you get that you're talking about tripling the cost of your reloading press plus you're talking about going through hundreds or thousands of dollars in components and i just don't have that volume of cash to stuff into that anymore so I've gotten to the point where I'm gonna start being very picky about what I reload but long and long story made short there will be no Trump slump at least not for the time being not for the ammo market anyway no

not for the ammo market and guns we We'll see if ammo gets too expensive. Guns might get cheaper. Hard to say. Hard to say, but we ain't going to see a Trump slump like I was hoping for. No, not at least not in the ammo market. I don't think. Although this is a wonderful time to point out that with the exception of a few people that I know, like the guys from Phoenix ammunition, there are precious few companies here in the United States

that load their own that load our ammo locally and There I don't believe there are any places here in the US they manufacture our own powder or primers powder. Yes powder Yes, where? wasn't Hot hoodie. Oh shit. I can't remember how to pronounce I know for a fact Hodgkin was getting a lot of their powder manufactured in Australia were they That's a Years ago one of their plants caught fire in New Mexico

Okay, I'd have to do some looking into I know at one point a lot of their powder was coming from overseas Maybe I'm wrong. It's been a long time since I've looked into it. Now, primers, I'm pretty sure we don't have a local source of this, because I remember some scuttlebutt from the Lone community a couple of years ago where Italy, apparently from, yeah, apparently a group of people were like pooling money and getting loans, trying to see if they could get the EPA to allow them

to make a primer manufacturer plant here in the US, because we didn't have one anywhere in the country for whatever reason. Yeah. Why would we need to make critical wartime materials here in our own country? That's that's some weird stuff. Yeah, we'll see. But does anyone make powder in South America? But does anyone make powder in South America? Let me look. Okay, you look, I'll start talking. So the banner, the topic for the show. Phil learned a new trick. So let's start off with a bit of conversation before I start to screen share and like do a show and tell with y'all.

I've done a couple episodes tell with y'all. Um, I've done a couple episodes about my radio nerd journey and radios are cool and fun. And everything I'm going to talk about today about software defined radio or SDR is not meant to be a replacement for radios because I think whatever radio service you like, you really should have at least a radio in their radio service. But I started dipping my toe into SDR mostly because when I did the communications class for cyber survivalist, I talked about the radio services, some about the equipment,

I talked a lot about comm security and signals intelligence. And over the course of doing that class, I realized that there were things I wanted to integrate into the class that I hadn't originally. So that was a chance for me to go back and do some more research and bring some new tricks to the table so that the next time I teach that class, it's got a little bit more meat to it. And y'all get to be my test dummy. So thanks. Hey man. So what is, so what SDR is for those that don't know software defined radio. The idea is that if you have a radio,

it has a transceiver in it and it tunes according to the hardware. Software defined radio means that you have software, a computer program that is doing your tuning, that is modulating your bandwidth, that is doing all of your decoding and all your modulating. It's all dealt with in software. Now what this does is it makes, first of all, it makes SDR, a fairly cheap thing to get into. All you need is like one of these little USB dongles, which you can get on Amazon for like 30 bucks, or you could spend like 10 or 12 bucks more and you get this and some antennas and some other things that are fairly useful and are

worth the money and one SDR will get you into this weird little world of like abandoned where and pet projects and radio nerd nonsense they put on GitHub. It's a, you have to be prepared. So to get into software, to find radio, you have to be prepared to like, indulge yourself in a bit of a science project because there is no like Microsoft SDR suite. It's a lot of these little programs that are just scattered on the internet

that somebody cooked up and then put out there for the community, and they've had very degrees of work done on them. You're gonna have to do some fooling around with them to figure out how to make them work and how to make them behave themselves on your equipment. I've got an old Windows 10 loaded laptop. Doesn't take a lot of really serious bit of hardware to run them and this thing runs it just fine.

But I will say that in between like finding the right DLL files, some of which I had to go find on the internet or random places, getting the proper drivers loaded, there was a learning curve with this. If I remember right, you started playing with it about a week and a half, two weeks ago? About that. Yeah, you got all the hardware in and then you started dinking around with the software. Yeah, and by the time I'd gotten to just before last episode, had a couple I think I had two out of these three programs running Okay, one was still fighting me and it was still fighting me

Until Friday afternoon. I finally finally got the thing to like behave itself. That's a story all to itself I remember right that was a driver issue, wasn't it? Kind of So I had... Let's remind me later to address that when we get to RTL 1090 and the ADS-B programs because that was the one that was really that was the most fun to get running. that was the most fun to get running. But in any case, so let's do this and start the show and tell. Let's do that. Me and Nick will go away for the moment. That'll work.

So it's also worth pointing out, and let me throw this up real quick. That is the two of the antennas that came with the SDR, and those are currently sitting on the other side of my room, attached to my laptop. Neat. Now, kind of the cool part about SDR is, if I'd have been thinking ahead, I would have. Yeah, we'll do that.

That'll work. That way you don't have matter of facts hanging across everything. Oh, yeah. The thing about SDR is, yeah, the thing about SDR and the thing that makes it a bit tricky to utilize is that you are 100%. I liken this very much to the difference between buying ammunition off the store shelf and And the thing that makes it a bit tricky to utilize is that you are 100%... I liken this very much to the difference between buying ammunition off the store shelf and reloading it.

The cool thing about reloading is that you can make things happen that you can't buy. You can't just go buy off the store shelf. Like my analogy earlier about the 90-gram Hornady XTP in the 9-millimeter round. But the problem is if you don't take the time to fool with the software and tweak it and play with it then you wind up not getting great results out. So like that's why I started off by saying that I would never encourage someone to not get a radio. Get a radio, get a couple of radios, you can scan frequencies with those things, you can hunt around, you can do all kinds of

things. And in some ways if I wanted to, if I wanted to do what I'm doing right now, this is 98.5 FM, which is my local FM station. Bear with me, I'm just looking for a stronger one. One of one nine's pretty stout. So the reason you aren't here in this, by the way, is because I have that laptop muted so that you don't hear horrible echoing because we tried to do this and have system audio before the show started. But there was too many things going on.

The echo was horrible. The echo was horrifying and I had already sipped too much of this whiskey to try to like, you know, figure out too many ways around it. But anyway, I suppose if we had a video recording of it, you could do that then. But yeah, but I didn't want to I didn't want to do that just case there was like somebody in the chat that had a question I want to be able to like, you know do this more on the fly exactly But the thing of it is is that right now for this one use case I want to listen to local FM station you could do this on AM FM radio Probably faster than you can get this program stood up. You literally just get the radio spin the dial till you find a station

Done deal you can do that on most of these GMRs radios, by the way. Most of them have an FM mode, so you can just listen to your local FM stations. Those things are not difficult. What SDR does, what intrigued me, was the ability to do things you can't do with a standard radio. So looking at this signal, by the way, you can see on the right side of that band, there's a really sharp line right there, and it's pretty consistent, right? Yeah. My suspicion is that without digging into it, and I don't have a digital decoding

Software on here yet. My suspicion is that it's probably an H an HD radio station. Oh, okay So really it's really narrow high high amplitude Yeah, and you can see Over here you got the same thing you've got this normal waterfall and then you have this one really sharp peak right in the middle of it. My suspicion is that's probably a digital signal just by looking at it. Okay, so you can do a little bit of signals analysis without even listening to it then. Bear with me, I goop something up. Yep, same thing here.

You've got a little bit of a sideband there and another one over here on this side on either side of 105.3, which is one of our local FM stations. That's also the rebroadcast for 870 AM. So that's like our local talk radio station. But the thing of it is, is that if you look down in these waterfalls, there's obviously something on either side of that center frequency and whatever it is, it's not FM modulation. It's a weird, I mean, just by looking at it, looking at the waterfall, you can tell that there's something there.

And this is one of those things that SDR allows you to do is that it puts a face on what you're hearing and it allows you to see things in the radio spectrum that ordinarily you would never have any inclination there if you just took a radio dial and spun the tuning dial. Now, go ahead. So if that's not FM modulation there that we're seeing, those two rectangular peaks, what would you guess that that is? Because I have honestly no idea. My guess just from glancing and a little bit of experience, probably a digital signal. Okay, so a different variation, like a wideband digital signal you think?

Yeah, very possibly. Okay. But the only reason I say that is because like you can just take one look at this and the way it's moving around and everything and that is very obviously an analog signal Yeah, but then on either side of it. Those are not analog signals just by looking at the waterfall. Yeah Like I said, I don't have digital decoding software on here yet It was it's one of my one of my action items to play with as I dig further into this and that's kind of the That's gonna be a theme here. Is that of the things I've already learned how to do with SDR There are other things that I'm poking my nose further into which some of it's like hobbyist stuff And some of it might genuinely be useful

But at the end of the day though to me the real take-all away from this very first program which by the way this is SDR sharp and this is just your basic garden variety software defined radio package it allows you to look at the entire the entire radio frequency bandwidth all the way I think up to like 1.7 gigahertz or something and crazy like that all the way down in HF. Interesting. So with this you can do things like listen local AM FM stations. You can check in on your local airport if you're if you switch thing to AM and you sort of listen to Airband. You can start

listening to local ham radio nets on HF. You can start listening to local ham radio nets on HF you can start listening to There's a use case for this although I haven't really this isn't really packaged to be able to do it but there is a use case for SDR to use it to basically look for like hidden cameras and stuff because They all they all you know, usually they output on about 900 megahertz. Oh Okay, that would make so you. So you can, so you can like go take your local, you know, go into let's say an Airbnb, unplug your wireless, the WiFi router, and then you can start with a, you know, with a little bit of attenuation and directional antenna, start looking around

for signals coming from things that shouldn't have WiFi signals coming out of them. Interesting. So that could be, that actually could be fairly useful then, especially say if you do happen to stay in a lot of Airbnbs or if you're just looking to find other people that are broadcasting around you in a situation where you're trying to grab local intelligence. You've got your published radio stations, you can eliminate those right off right off the crack You've got your published ham repeaters gmrs repeaters fmrs, and I think there's like one other one, but If you see anything outside of that

Could be worth a listen Yeah, and more importantly like obviously I've got the audio disabled on this. But for most of these signals, if I wanted to listen in on them, all you have to do is click on that speaker icon. And then whatever your frequency is centered on, you'll start listening to immediately. So what SDR Sharp does in a nutshell is this is oh I have to address this

Never get the notifications alright, so Yeah, I mean that's YouTube shenanigans But we did move the recording time for the streams from now on from 5 p.m. Central back to 730 Central on Thursdays And that'll be a thing from now. Yeah, it's just gonna be at 730 just so that we can give time for everybody to get home from work, have a bite to eat, you know, it makes everybody's life a little easier. Yeah, most importantly, it gives me time to actually get home from my new work schedule. That's true. Otherwise, he would have to be broadcasting from the road in his car.

Not a good idea. But yeah, like I was saying, so that's kind of SDR sharp in a nutshell. Is using from the car a ticketable offense? I know being on your cell phone is, but is being on the laptop. I don't want to find out. Interesting. I don't want to find out. I should consult my attorney. You can try it in, you can try it in Illinois and let me know I'll consult my attorney instead It'll be way quicker Everything is illegal in Illinois if it's even remotely fun. You know, that's not entirely inaccurate All right, so like I said

That's SDR sharp in a nutshell SDR sharp will let you That's SDR sharp in a nutshell. SDR sharp will let you creep in on all of your local radio frequencies and not just them. And as long as you have the appropriate software, like I said, I don't have digital decoding software yet. It's on the list. But if I did, then those couple of side bands that we were seeing on either side of the FM stations that I'm pretty sure are HD radio signals, we could have poked our head in and listened to, or really any digital signal. Interesting. So what SDR Sharp does is it gives you kind of a base layer. It is in many ways, it is a hobbyist. I just want to play around with this new thing and see what I can see kind of thing. But I do feel like it has the capability to offer you information. And information is always useful if you find a way to use it.

Yeah, even just knowing there's a signal out there, even if you can't listen to it yet, you know, to look for it in the future to listen to it. Yep. Remember me telling you about radio nerd abandonware command line? Yeah, love it. Oh yeah, this definitely looks like one dude did it in his basement. Almost certainly, but give me a moment while I make sure I've got this spun up.

So this is a program called SDR trunk, which years and years ago, you could, give me a second. I can't multitask that well, apparently. That's all right. second. I can't multitask that well apparently. That's alright. PCG saying that there's a wiki that helps you identify radio signals, examples of sounds, waterfall images. He's gonna send the link over so that would be fantastic. Cool thanks for looking out Mem. Oh and for anybody who happens to run across

this PCG, Partisan comms group comm syndicate If you're into radio nerd stuff, those are my radio nerds Like me a significant amount of money I Mean they might cost you a lot in ham gear. I'm trying to cost you a lot of night vision So, you know somewhere between the two of us will bounce trying to cost you a lot of night vision. So you know, somewhere between the two of us will balance. Yeah, but I'm just saying like, if I have radio questions, those are the

boys I go to because they put me to shame. They absolutely have a phenomenal knowledge base. Yeah. But so this is a program called str trunk. And yes, Nick, it was probably made by one person in their basement. This is not Microsoft levels of polish. No, but I have found it looks very functional. Yeah. So let's start with the explanation of what this is while the audience goes, ooh, ah. So a long, long time ago, Barney Fife and his buddies would talk on an analog radio, pretty much like the rest of us still do. You know, like you would call dispatch and they would have a radio

and they talk to you on your radio on one frequency and everything was nice and simple to listen in on. And then, insert rambling about police state and weaponization of police and police budgets expanding gratuitously and the number of cops growing infinitesimally. Anyway, back to the back to the topic. Basically, there's so many law enforcement officers,

so many first responders that are all trying to talk to each other all the time that the the available bandwidth for public service radio is no longer enough to cover the number of talk groups they need. Hasn't been for a long time. So the way to think about this is if let's say Nick, you and I want to talk to each other and my wife and I want to talk to each other. But I don't want the three of us on one channel because I don't want to discuss certain things with you that I would

discuss my wife, so on and so forth. I don't want her knowing about the money I'm gonna spend on gun stuff, and I don't want you knowing about what she's gonna wear to bed. Fair enough. Those kinds of things. So I would have two talk groups,

and in the old days, the analog days, that would mean two different radio frequencies. I'd get on channel one to talk to you, channel two to talk to her. But now I would need a channel for you, a channel for her, a channel for my daughter, a channel for your wife, a channel for all, you know, one channel each for like 15 other people. And we just ran out of channels. So this is where trunked radio systems come in. This is what this

thing is you're looking at over here. That makes sense. The way a trunked radio system is works is that there is one, in reality reality there's a couple there's like one primary multiple alternate control channels and that channel sends out a digital signal to every radio that is on that trunked radio system and it says Phil Nick y'all are in talk group a switch to channel one to talk to each other okay and then we talk and then we're done. It releases that channel back into the queue. And then if I try to call my wife, I key up and I'm keying up on say talk group B for me and my wife. The control channel tells me and my wife and your

radio by the way, hey, if you're in talk group B go to channel one because channel one's clear, right? So you have one channel on a digital signal that is telling all the radios on that net if you're in this talk group you need to be on this channel to hear this conversation and In doing so you can have 20 30 40 talk groups on only four or five channels. That makes sense because the yeah, because eventually you're going to hit the bandwidth limitation of that, but it's going to happen a lot slower.

Yeah. Well, and the thing with this is that with this, we have the capability of expanding a set number of channels to handle dozens, if hundreds of talk groups, right and That's that's what this is on this side. So over here on the other screen. You can see that yellow channel that says control For the moment that channel was keyed up on that frequency Of course it goes to idle as soon as I look at it Come on somebody say something it goes to idle as soon as I look at it come on somebody say something goes

717 16 875 I think it was yeah So that's your primary control channel and it is tell and as those were the rest of those signals come in and say call That is somebody who's trying to call their talk group So the control channel tells everybody on that talk group switch to this channel and then the conversation happens. If during the time that is happening, another talk group comes in,

then the control channel say, okay, y'all are having this conversation on channel one, channel two goes to this talk group and it just cycles through them. So this is frequency hopping, but not in the way the military does it. The military does frequency hopping to make it difficult to hear the conversation because they jump like they jump a channel every so many tenths of a second, right?

Yeah, up or down. Yeah, this is frequency hopping to expand a set number of channels to handle multiple other purposes. So if if you had, let's say digital, if you had a digital radio and you just put it on one of these frequencies and just sat there and listen, you would eventually hear a conversation. You just wouldn't necessarily hear every conversation happening in that net. Yeah. Now, here's the frustrating part. You're probably seeing a pink label pop up right now that says encrypted. Yeah, so. You're probably seeing a pink label pop up right now that says encrypted. Yeah. So in addition to trunked radio systems, a lot of law enforcement agencies have started encrypting their transmissions.

And unfortunately, my local law enforcement community has encrypted their transmission. So even with SDR trunk, I can't hear what they're saying. I can't listen to dispatch. I can't listen to dispatch. I can't listen to the local sheriff's department. Oddly enough, the state police are not encrypted. Don't ask me why that that's a little confusing to me, but it's probably a budgetary thing with how large of how large of an outfit they are because it requires all new radios.

I do believe to go to encrypted radio traffic. I believe so. But the one thing that stood out to me and the reason I still think this has utility and I'll just say that if you're curious about the trunk radio systems in your area, radioreference.com has some amazing databases that can show you are there trunk radio systems in your area, what talk groups are and are not encrypted, so you can figure out is the juice worth the squeeze. If memory serves me. If you look through the talk groups, there's a feel and it'll say D if it's a digital signal and DE if it's digital encrypted. If it's encrypted, not only can you not listen to it, but it's illegal to try to.

So, you know, just color inside the lines or don't tell me about it. I have feelings about public servants encrypting their radio traffic. Oh, you dirty libertarian you. That sounds like something I would say. Well, I just feel like if the police aren't doing their jobs correctly, they should not need to encrypt their radio traffic from us. I don't disagree with that sentiment,

but I will say this. If there's an organization out there actively targeting police and doing violence to them through their radio traffic, that sounds like an illegal act that should be policed. As opposed to just listening, cause you're a nerd. Yeah. I mean, like, look, if somebody is out there actively

trying to harm police officers, that is an illegal act in and of itself. It doesn't matter that they're doing it via radio. Yeah, but now the thing I was going to point out was that even though my local dispatch and leos are all encrypted, there's a number of organizations that are not fire departments are not around. Fire departments around departments are not around. Fire departments around here are not encrypted and it's really useful to be able to listen to them if you want to know why the hell you're hearing

sirens run around all over the place. The state police are not encrypted. Every organization has a set number of interoperability channels where like if the state police and the sheriff's department had to coordinate on something they would all get on a shared interop channel. Those are usually not encrypted. None of those are encrypted and I was thinking to myself like how could that be useful and the truth of the matter is that if there's anything going on that's big enough to get the sheriffs, NOPD, St. Tammany Parish and like the local cops all screaming at each other. It's probably something I'd like to know about and that those channels are not

encrypted. That's fair. So like to me, this should come as no great shock to anybody who's known me for more than 15 seconds. This is intelligence gathering apparatus to me. Absolutely. The ability to fire up a laptop, plug in two, two SDRs cause you need two of them. Unfortunately, you need one to read the control and you need one to read all the talk channels. Yeah, actually. Yep, if you sit there and look at that screen right there, it's telling you what the two SDRs are doing right now.

Interesting. It's flipping back and forth. And I was under the mistaken impression that like one SDR was just control channel and one SDR was just the talk channel. But looking at this for a while, it switches back and forth. It's interesting It's it's running them back. It's running the two of them in parallel Which doesn't matter to anybody who's not a massive nerd But the point remains is that you have to have to right which means you also need two antennas

But you need all that so that you can listen to the control channel and the talk channels. And in practice, when you're listening to this, you'll have a couple of minutes of just dead air where nobody's talking. And the next thing you know, you just get, it just starts firing. Interesting. So yeah, that is SDR trunk. There's also another program called unit trunker, which some people prefer. I didn't fool with it. This is the one I latched onto and you'll find that there's not many of these programs. I'm gonna say this is the one to get because truthfully, this is the one that worked on my ancient old hodgepodge laptop. Jesus Christ. Well, crap start over. I was chatting with Phil's wife and missed the start. Stuart. I literally warned you all in the Patreon chat. Five minutes out. He voted for this. He did. He did vote in favor of 730 PM because it'd be easier for

him to watch. He voted for this and he was still late. It's all right. He likes he likes to give us some sass. That's that's really what it is. Joe technically it is radio computer stuff. It is. Yes Joe. This is radio and computer stuff. So so worst of both worlds Yeah, if if you think radios are witchcraft and you think computers were made by the devil you might just Want to like walk away now? But on the other hand I think it's pretty cool and y'all know how I am about like Intel You know signals intelligence like every opportunity to learn stuff around I am about like Intel, you know signals intelligence like every opportunity to learn stuff around

Every opportunity to learn about the information learn information about the world around you is like a happy mill as far as I'm concerned Yes. Yes, Joe witchcraft sorcery. This is this is like teaching a druid necromancy. Yes If you like that analogy Okay, so last but not least now now this, this bears a conversation. Go for it. Oh, that's this program. This program was the bane of my existence for several days. existence for several days. This is a program called RTL 1090. Now 1090 because all of your aircraft carrying Sponder signals broadcast on 1090 megahertz 1090. And this program does one thing and one thing only it listens to exactly that frequency and it reports all of those messages that are being being down to these antennas in my room by local aircraft that are

flying within the area. Four of them at the moment. Interesting. And if we want something that's like kind of useful we could flip over to this table view where it's coalescing all those signals into a list of the aircraft that is tracking. And then if we want something slightly more useful than that we can fire up the scope which I currently have set to roughly my home as the as the home location. That makes sense. And those little blips are aircraft flying around my house.

Interesting. Aircrafts with active transponders. Yes, which now here's the thing about that. Most aircraft have, most aircraft above a certain size already have a transponder and According to what I was hearing just recently Apparently there was a rule put in place by the FA last year that is mandating transponders in all aircraft all private aircraft Commercial aircraft were already required to have sure I wonder if they're gonna drones as well That I don't know I mean already required to have sure i wonder if they're gonna do that with drones as well that i don't know i mean because they've already started to put some pretty stringent rules in places with the drone flying just because of people doing tom coolery yeah but like i said that's that is rtl 1090 in nutshell. You can see a visual map representation of my local area.

I could actually reset the home location anywhere I wanted or I could just scroll, scroll around. But what you're seeing there is the aircraft that it is saying are there based on the ADSB or the transponder signals that that antenna is picking up above me and based on testing It looks like I've got about a 40 50 mile range. That's actually within 10 acres Yeah, well, I mean that's an antenna here in the house If I was outside probably get a little bit better or if I had it if I had an antenna like 40 or 50 feet Of mass height right even better. Yeah, that'd be a significant improvement in your reception But here's thing that's only moderately useful because you can't even hardly read that

I mean I could put my nose being on screen and still can't read that and the map doesn't get a lot bigger than that Until you fire up this other program called virtual radar server All she have to run one to run the other. Yes. So RTL 1090 actually snatches all those messages, all virtual radar server does. So somebody made a better overlay for 1090. Actually, it made a better overlay for this and for another program called Dump 1090,

which does roughly the same thing, but Bob's your uncle. Oh, look at that. That's very useful. And now I can click on that and tell you that that is a 737 operated by Southwest Airlines. I could even tell you that. Interesting. Apparently it took off from Louis Armstrong and it's heading to Nashville. Interesting.

I'm not sure what my use case would be for that, but if you have everything else already rigged up to do this, adding on, I mean, I know you had a problem with this one, Phil, and I believe we discussed it being drivers. What actually ended up being the problem that stopped this from working? Okay. So, the problem, the issue, the difficulty was. Remember how I started off by saying that most of these programs were built by radio nerds as passion projects who do not really

like Microsoft levels of perfection and polish? This one in particular, the downloader did not include the downloader, which is a batch file, by the way. And by the way, if loading sketchy software onto your main computer gives you the heebie-jeebies you should not play with any of this stuff because all of this software comes from sketchy places and that's why it's gone that's why it's on a laptop with no PII or financial data You Just had a plane appear out of nowhere Actually So what happened was? You see where that bird is relative to my location that blue dot right there

It's probably because the antenna is right outside of a window so But it's only flying at 14,000 feet to so anyway but So what happened was the downloader for this was a batch file and that batch file Apparently goes to different places on the internet to download different driver packages DLL files and two of them that's more kinds of sketchy I Did start off by saying that? DLL files and two of them. That's more kinds of sketchy.

I did start off by saying that, um, now I will say that these, these packages are fairly well known in the SDR community. So like there are certain places where it is fairly safe to go to for these things because the community would have, would have screamed bloody murder about it by now. And, um, all the packages I'm using, like none of these came from like Russian spoof sites or anything like these came from Pretty pretty well accepted by the SDR community places, okay But through the DLL files had to be downloaded and they were they were directed at dead links. So I Was missing I think it was lip sub dot DLLll and RTL-SDR-DLL. Okay.

Now I found, I followed the instructions I found in another guide about where to go find them. And I downloaded those DLL files and put them in there. And RTL-1090 promptly did not work. Like categorically refused to do anything. It would connect to the SDR It would not find any aircraft, and I had no gain control interesting So you can see here like

There's my gain right right and here's a little slider with the gain. And Tuner AGC and RTL AGC, that's the automatic gain control. Well, those were both, you could turn those on or off, but you couldn't turn the gain up. So what was happening was something in the DLL files was screwed up. And as a result, the gain for the SDR was set at zero and could not be raised. That's not helpful. And even when you set to automatic gain control the gain would not raise. I literally brought this setup outside to Lakefront Air to the New Orleans Lakefront on the Mandeville side. I had an aircraft flying over my head and this thing couldn't pick

it up. Well, I mean if the game is set to zero then you read nothing. That's... Yeah. So in the course of trying to troubleshoot that and this is a cautionary tale for all of you that want to play with this stuff. I had two different SDRs, tried them both, that didn't

work. I had five different Tenniss tried them both that didn't work. I have five different tenors Including this one that I purchased that is tuned for a thousand ninety megahertz and by the way works very well It's screw. I mean, it's just a little bit thing screws right on the end of the SDR I'm currently using the little dipole that came with it and I've tested this and that back-to-back and they literally track the exact same number of aircraft at the same time. Nice. Like this might work well. And this is certainly convenient to just be able to like screw into an SDR,

plug it in the side of a laptop when I'm sitting outside and not have like, you know, a cable and an antenna and stuff to set up. But this was not any better than that dipole with the dipole's length set to what it needed to be. But anyway, but it occurred to me in testing two different SDRs, all the different antennas, I tested RTL 1090 and Dump 1090, so two different programs, kept having the same problem. And then it occurred to me, the drivers. That's the one thing that was common in all these because what I did in an effort to like stupid proof my installs Was that when I installed SDR sharp it is installed it to its own directory

With its own DLL files with its own driver packages And then when I did SDR trunk I did a that in another drive with another set of drivers with another like I copied all the drivers and everything. I worked from SDR sharp because it worked and I did I made another directory put all that stuff over there for SDR trunk and I loaded that but I had these two things completely compartmentalized so that one wouldn't screw up the other and I did the same thing for RTL 1090. Except when I did RTL 1090, I didn't copy those two DLL files from the other programs that I knew they were working for. Because like a smart guy, I followed the instructions and got them from some weird place on the

internet. So when I grabbed those two DLL files from the SDR sharp folder, because that one was working, and I dropped them into RTL-1090 and hit the start button it ran perfectly track five aircraft. Interesting. I wonder if you just got a bad file or a corrupted file for those two DLLs. That's kind of my suspicion. One or both of them was corrupted. The best I can tell you is that like learned from my stupid mistake and I don't think there's anything necessarily wrong with having like compartmentalizing these install packages and different drives and doing a copy paste

of those DLL files. That way each one has their own, they're all running independently of each other, they can't fool each other. But I would say that once you have a program, like once you have SDR sharp and it's running and it's behaving itself. Well with your str If ever you install another program project or another program and it needs those DLL files

Copy paste it from str sharp. Okay, you know, you know those are working, you know, they're playing well with your str equipment Don't do what I did and have to learn the hard way because that was like several days of why isn't this stupid thing working? Hmm. And unfortunately, those files are kind of a black box unless you really understand the coding, which I don't. Right. I am not a computer coder. I am like you have to bear in mind that like a lot of my skill set, which is I guess part personality and part like, you know, work is I'm very

good at poking and prodding the black box until it does what I want to do. Sure. You know, like I do a lot of application testing for work and I'm not a developer, which sometimes is a help because I don't understand what's behind the curtain. I don't know what Oz looks like. But I know that if I push this- That's ideal for somebody who's doing testing because if you have somebody that understands how it works They can guess their way through it easier

And for me what I do is I know that if I push this button this happens that if I pull this lever This happens and if I turn this dial this happens and through enough cataloging of the inputs outputs I figure out how the black box works even though I don't understand how it works. Yeah you may not understand the gears inside the box but you understand how to get what you need out of it. Precisely. Yeah. So this is kind of like the last thing that I fool with was RTL 1090 and virtual radar server. You know this is it's been pointed out a couple of point out to me like hey I've got flight aware or air nav they do the exact same thing and I'm like

kinda So understand that when you when you go to flight aware either on the website or on your app or whatever You are looking at this You're looking at a networked networked group of these little ADSB receivers all around the country. And what FlightAware does is aggregate all the data. Interesting. So what I have here is FlightAware without FlightAware.

This is what's in my local area that I'm receiving through this antenna and this hardware and this software right now in real time Flying above my head. So if the Internet's out and by the way, the other thing I did was I started um, I Put a plug into this that allows me to cash Excuse me, it allows me to cash the map tiles. Oh, okay so I don't necessarily have to have the internet to look at this in a local area. And also RTL 1090 has the scope feature, which gives you kind of a really stripped down version of this

where you can at least see your aircraft position over a map overlay. And that is also independent of the internet. Oh, that's nice. I was wondering about that. I mean, that is kind of like one thing. This is literally taking all these map tiles from Google map. So you can catch those so you don't have to have internet connection. But even if go ahead, what is the file size to cash your local area?

Is it negligible? Like on a modern hard drive? I Only enough It hasn't requested anything in a while. I would have to go back and take a look. Yeah, no worries. I was just curious I'm guessing it's probably fairly small because it looks like a lo-fi map a Little I can tell you once I can tell you honestly, but this is not a really high-performance laptop It is older than hell and it has Windows 10 on it because that was an upgrade for Windows 7 I'm wondering if you couldn't Make yourself a pie box

like a raspberry pie box self-contained system running this all through Linux and Then have you so that will go box this all through Linux and then have your so that will go box. So let me go ahead and like take that down, take this down. I think we're done playing with SDR. So. So what I was going to say was it's actually not uncommon, especially for the ADSB reception to run these off of Raspberry Pi, Pi 3 is most common.

I mean, it doesn't take a tremendous amount of horsepower to just log that data and then upload it to a website or put it on a sheet or something. That's not difficult. That's commonly done with Raspberry Pis. I've actually been looking at... I've actually been looking at...'ve actually been looking at so in the name full disclosure like I have I have only played around with Raspberry Pi's to the

degree that like Stuart built me a a data logger to read electrical signals so I could do some testing on some of my stuff with it with the man pack nice and even he had to build that thing for me and walk me through it. I know nothing about Raspberry Pi. No, no, no, no. In the course of messing around with SDRs, I've kind of developed a bit of interest in them because it's a very common thing apparently for people to run SDRs off of like a Pi 3.

And it looks like the Pi 4 probably have a bit more horsepower to do it. And I've been looking at the fact that like they make some fairly reasonably sized little touch screens that'll connect directly to a Pi 4. So I'm kind of torn with the idea of like, how would it work in practice to put one of these small seven inch touch screens on a Pi 4,

shove an SDR RTL onto the back of it, load some software that I know is available for the Pi's operating systems. I mean, I have a Pi 4 that's running a 3D printer server. I was running two 3D printers off of it for a very long time. Well, what I'm thinking is make a small seven inch touch screen, basically something

that'll do SDR sharp and it will run ADSB signals in a small self-contained package off of a USB battery I would imagine well because you can let's see the pi 4s can power Those small travel hard drives as well. So space wouldn't be an issue because you could put a 1 terabyte SSD on that Wouldn't even need it based on these these file sizes, dude, most of these file sizes are 3 and 4 megabytes.

Well, I was just thinking for like the map tiles and stuff like that. So if you wanted to cache like the continental US on there, it's going to be a couple of gig, probably maybe 10 tops. Honestly, even for that, I would probably forego the use of virtual radar server

and just use the scope feature built into RTL 1090. I mean, it takes no internet connection. It would literally just be a... I'm really thinking about, like, from the perspective of, like, if I built something that was literally just a handheld SDR scanner, what's the way to get the most functionality in the most lightweight package? Probably, actually you could probably do a headless pie and just integrate that with your cell phone and use your cell phone as the sign in screen. That's near a possibility, bearing in mind that I have iPhones and I don't know how they play with those.

Or if I would have to get an Android. Can iPhones use a web browser? Yes. Then you should be fine. Can iPhones do Bluetooth connectivity? Yes. Then you probably can do it. Cause I know I can log into my Pi 4 with my over browser on my Android phone.

And it's any browser you can log into it. Granted you have to be on the same wifi, but if you have a Wi-Fi enabled Raspberry Pi you should be able to or a Bluetooth enabled Raspberry Pi You should be able to connect to that it probably just a matter of software at that point but I mean, you know, I Suppose the only downside to those seven inch touch screens is there they're fairly power hungry for what they are Downside to those seven inch touch screens is there they're fairly power hungry for what they are

So if you're doing like a man pack style system You're just gonna have to take into account the greater power draw of that touchscreen Yeah, and again, I like it's something that I've only begun to look at the big thing I'm looking at right now before I start messing around with a Raspberry Pi is What can I do to push what I already have here? So I think the next thing to tuck my head into is going to be some of the digital decoding software that's out there so that some of those digital signals that I'm seeing in the SDR sharp program, I'll actually be able to listen to them and figure out what in the world they are in that bandwidth and the FM

Band they're almost certainly, you know HD radio signals just judging by where they are HD radio signals I'm wondering if those side bands aren't Band name song name signals tagging along very well because I know at one point my My local radio stations started doing that and you could you could see on your cars display what song it was. Yeah. Although it is worth pointing out that so one of the things I'm looking at doing is actually pulling down digitized images from the NOAA weather satellites. That's one of the things on my to-do list. It's a reach item from where I'm at now. And in the course of learning about that, looking at the waterfall and everything, those NOAA satellites are broadcasting an audible carrier tone with digital data overlaid on it.

So when you lock onto it, you can hear an audible, repeating carrier tone. Interesting. And then there's the digital data being vocalized in addition to that. And when you've run that through the appropriate program, it can decode that and turn it into an image. Interesting. So what you're saying is that that very well, that digital signal that we're seeing in the waterfall might be like channel information.

Yeah, it could be both. It could be, yeah. It can easily, it can very easily be. I mean, if it's digital, it could be digital music and digital and the station information or it could even be the the song and artist information for all I know. Yeah, that's fair. I mean, I don't know what the NOAA satellite picture information would be phenomenal for weather, especially during hurricane season for you guys. Live weather updates when the power's out?

So yes and no. There's some limitations with that. The NOAA satellites, what I can do with the equipment I have is I can download the APT images that are being beamed down on, roughly speaking, I think they're in the VHF band, if memory serves me correctly. 140 megahertz, give or take, 146, 147, somewhere in there. Those NOAA satellites are NOAA 15, 18, and 19. Each one operates on a slightly different frequency. But I can literally catch those with these rabbit ears with the ear set to 120 degrees to the right length

so it's resonant. And with the software I already have, I'm really just waiting a couple of days for the next satellite pass, because that's the thing is that these are low earth satellites, low earth orbit satellites. So I have to wait until the next pass comes pretty close to over my head before I can give it a whirl and see if I can catch how often those things

through. It'll come through once, twice a day for several days, and then the path will drift further away from me. So I would get a couple of bites added every month. Okay, well Well that could still be useful It could be but what I was gonna say was that the APT signal is kind of low resolution I mean APT and forgive me for not remembering an hour and 10 minutes in this show I probably should have looked it up and had it written down someplace, but you know, this is an amateur operation APT Standard was state-of- of the art in the 1960s.

Ah, so the resolution is fairly low. There's a lot of noise in the signal. Those satellites also broadcast on L-band, which is a microwave. Those images are very high resolution and very nice, but you also need a small satellite dish to pick them up. You would. and very nice but you also need a small satellite dish to pick them up you would now that being said there is a YouTube channel out there called save it for parts I want to be this dude's friend he is a nerd and I mean nerd in the the

most friendly heartwarming way possible he's a gigantic nerd that makes me look like a stoner surfer dude. Oh dear. Like, oh dear. But cool dude, does a lot of SDR projects, a lot of satellite-based projects, and he's fooled around a lot with this stuff. Okay.

I mean, being able to listen to digital radio signals and being able to Download the apt images may try my hand at trying to listen to the ISS just for fun. I mean Those are a couple things I have left on my plate to play around with SDR But for me the the big thing I wanted to do was I wanted to get SDR trunk running which I have and At this point I have the entire SDR trunk running, which I have. And at this point I have the entire LWIN, the entire Louisiana State Trunk System is sitting in this laptop at this point.

Hey, that works, man. Yeah, and I was able to get the ADSB heat software running with RTL 1090. So, you know, like the thing of it is, is that it's not, I guess it's not super common knowledge, but like flight aware and AirNav, you can submit a request to those websites to not display your aircraft information.

So like you're- I think there's something about some artists recently that was getting tracked and stalked. Yes, so you are required as an aircraft operator to run your transponder, but you can send a request to AirNav and FlightAware and tell them, I don't want you showing it on your website and they have to comply with that. Okay. This thing doesn't give a damn. They're sending the signal out, I can track it. Now I probably won't be able to figure out who it is, but I can figure out what kind of aircraft it is. I can look at their tail number, I can track it. Now I probably won't be able to figure out who it is,

but I can figure out what kind of aircraft it is. I can look at their tail number. I can look up the information about what, where they've been and where they're going. So like to me, the biggest thing about- It's a fair question. I did answer them in the comments that it's information gathering and signals intelligence.

That's really what it is. Yeah, and I will cut Stuart some slack on this because by his own admission, he was horsing around with my wife, which is why he missed the front loading on this where we talk about like why I duck my I dip my toe into this, but just for the people that came in late, like this came about because when I taught the communications class for cyber survivalist, it occurred to me that I wanted to push the signals intelligence portion of that class further and offer more. And we talked a lot in that class about like using your radio as a scanner,

we talked about different opportunities to gather signals intelligence from your local area. And then it occurred to me that SDR gives you the ability to find more information about the radio frequency range in your local area. And whether or not that's useful is a question of can you make that information useful? Can you find that information? But what this gives you is the ability to find those signals that no scanner, no handheld radio is going to be able to find. Like the point we raised very early on was,

if I want to listen to like 105.3 FM in my local area, that radio back there will do it, an AMF radio and a car will do it. Like you don't need this. But as we were looking at that, we started seeing, oh, there's a digital signal here and there's a digital signal there and there's a digital signal here, and there's a digital signal there, and there's this, and there's this, and there's this.

And those are all things that an AMF radio would not have shown you, but you can see that with SDR. A handheld FM AM ham radio is not gonna show you that. Yeah. So like I said, like this is not, to me, this is not a plea to like throw your ham or your GM RS radio in the trash because your ham and GM RS radar are going to do things that

Your scanner will do things more efficiently than this will but what SDR gives you is a window into a world That the other pieces of equipment will fall short on Because that simple the simple inability to graphically represent the entire radio frequency from hf all the way up to almost microwaves that is something that even your high-end hf radios that do have a waterfall they're not going to be able to show you vhf uhf and so on so forth interesting i mean i can see where it would be useful. I don't know if I will personally get into it.

I have too many things going on in my life already, but I can see where as a radio guy, I can see where it would be intriguing and I could see where it would be useful at the very least to find out who's talking where, when, and potentially how you could listen into it. Yeah, and I wouldn't even count myself as like a radio guy. There's guys that know plenty more about all this stuff than I

do. For me, it more it is more of a, like, if you want to justify it as a curiosity, it's like 40 bucks to get into. It's, it's stupid cheap. This is not a, this is not a price restrictive hobby. If you want to justify it as a hobby, there is all sorts of depth to how far you want to take SDR if you want to continue to pursue it. Because once you have the hardware, right, then the only thing left is the software and the implementation and you know Just learning more about it learning how you can apply it right and if you approach it from the perspective I do of is an opportunity for signals intelligence that not many other things in this price range will give you Then it's another tool in the toolbox. I can tell you that Several years ago during the summer of love we all remember that

There were there was a protest happening in New Orleans down on the other side of the lake. We didn't really have any expectations. It was going to threaten us up here on the North Shore. We really weren't super concerned, but I did have a little bit of a concern because if that protest had come up the bridge and jumped into our part of town, we're only a mile and a half from the north end of the bridge. Okay. So it would have been really nice to be able to listen to the local first responders, the local fire department, the local interop channel, the local state police, and just have that extra intelligence gathering apparatus there to tell me, is there something about to happen that we should know about before

it comes to my day? Is there a situation evolving? Yeah, I mean, ultimately, like that is always my that is always my thing is, I want to know about problems when they're way out on the other side of the horizon. That's what str is to me is an opportunity to gather intelligence, when the problem is way off on the horizon Before it's a problem that's on my doorstep And then I get extra time to decide how to deal with the problem or is even a problem worth dealing with And if there's and here's the beautiful thing this falls into the same bag as

the guns the ammo the food the everything else we do in preparedness because if If well that and if a bad day never comes, I'm still going to shoot the guns because shooting is fine. Yep. I'm still going to shoot the ammo up because it doesn't go bad. I'm still going to eat the beans and the rice. Eventually, I'm still going to play with SDR. True. We waste plenty of money on things that don't have the capabilities this could potentially give you. Okay, Stuart, because I love and respect you as a mentor, I'll go through this.

Some yes, some no. So yes, if you're curious if the trunk radio system in your local area is encrypted or not Go to radio reference.com and you can do some looking into about what trunk radio systems are in your area and you can find out if They are encrypted in in my case. So there are certain talk groups that are encrypted and there's a lot that aren't so like even though the the one I would have loved to have listened to would have been like St. Timothy Parish Sheriff Dispatch because that's my area that I would have loved to

have known who was getting the Pope ho called on put it that way. That channel was locked out, can't listen to it. But what I can listen to is a lot of the fire and EMS channels. I can listen to all the interop channels. I can listen to the state police. Come to find out there are apparently interop channels specifically for the Army National Guard and the Air National Guard if they have to coordinate with local law enforcement. So like I was telling Nick at the beginning of the show to me those interop channels being You know being unencrypted means that if we have a serious situation Happening and we do have all these agencies talking back for those interop channels

It'll all be wide open and I'll be able to listen all of it at the very least you'd be able to gather the information They're sharing if nothing else, which is fantastic because that's probably the most important information Yeah, it's one of those situations where like it's slightly disappointing that I won't be able to list I won't be able to creep in on all these encrypted cut, you know talk channels during normal times But it does tell me that the the channels that are unencrypted are the ones most likely to be used if all hell is breaking loose. So it's kind of like as a hobbyist, oh damn that sucks. But then as the tinfoil hat wearing prepper guy, the fact that the channels that are unencrypted are the ones I really want to listen to when they're talking on them, that's kind of a happy meal so anyway that's SDR it's it's a collision

of like nerdery of radio sorcery and computer nerdery it is a miasma of abandoned where pet projects dreamt up in somebody's basement sketchy websites websites, github, it's a thing. I will make a point when I post this to the podcast, when I post this on the audio podcast, I will make a point of like including the link to it. I will just say that if you are curious about it, the best place I will send you to to start would be RTL SDR It's a blog it has links to the particular hardware that I purchase it has links to a lot of the other things I fold around with like SDR trunk and RTL 1090 like There's a ton of information there and it's a good place to start it's a good place to get a good base layer of information about what are the capabilities of SDR and

All I can say is that I wouldn't encourage you to go to any of these websites with the computer that has all your passwords saved on it because some of them are a little bit sketchy. And you probably want to load it on a laptop that you wouldn't mind baptizing if suddenly it starts speaking Chinese. it's so far it's proven to be a really interesting bit of nerdery for me to get into and like I see it as an opportunity for I see it from where I'm at now I see an intelligence gathering right gathering apparatus to go and like download the APT images from Noah and listen to the ISS that's just just, I'm just a nerdy. Yeah, that's gravy on top. That's just, I'm a nerd. And why

wouldn't I? Well, it helps you learn your tools. Yes. I will say that part of what part of what I personally have had to get in here, and it's something I didn't show is that on the desktop of that laptop is two cheat sheets. One of them has the NOAA frequencies because, or not the NOAA frequencies, but the NOAA satellite frequencies because each satellite's on a different frequency.

And the other one is the approximate antenna links I have to dial that dipole or that monopole into for different frequency ranges because the dipole has like extendable leads and the monopole was obviously telescoping so like depending on what you're trying to listen to you got to go over there and fool around with it absolutely yeah what I did for tonight frequency what I did for tonight was I set it to about 700 megahertz so it worked the best for SDR trunk and I just

had to leave it because it's like all the way across the room. I had to leave it there for RTL 1090 and I knew it'd be pretty close, which- Worked out. Turns out it wasn't bad. No, it seemed very usable, at least for the local area. I mean, I was able to,

like I was telling Nick before the show started, I was tracking 10 or 12 aircraft yesterday afternoon. Nice. Nice. Yeah. So before we wrap it up, any questions? Any burning desires, lingering wonderings? I think that it's definitely something that I probably will not use.

But I can see where it could be very useful. I would just have to have more time in the day to dedicate to learning it. I mean, you know, shelve all your 40K stuff for a couple of days, you find the time. Hey, I'm currently not working on any 40K stuff. I'm working on a steady rest for that lathe Right now

Yeah, I'm working on a steady rest for that lathe so that I can thread a barrel for a friend of mine So we'll get to that That seems like a worthwhile cause yeah All right, well I don't want to belabor the show too much We're like an hour and 25 minutes and listen to me talk about the nerdiest BS. It's definitely interesting, though. It looks really cool. It looks like it'd be a lot of fun to play with. But dude, I have so many things.

Yeah, it's I mean, it's one of those things where I encourage anyone is remotely interested, like just try it out. I mean, like, except for like just try it out. I mean like said for like 45 bucks off of Amazon you get one of your six sent to me with the antennas and Then you just have to like, you know Close your close squint your eyes shut and turn your head to the side while you push the enter key and hope you're not Downloading every computer virus no demand onto your laptop, but mine's still working and hasn't let the magic smoke out So it must be okay. That's fair. As long as you keep either that either that or the laptop

is so ancient the computer viruses don't know what to do in there. They're like, why are there cobwebs or the viruses are so ancient the operating system that they were written for no longer exists? I mean, one of these one of these install pack just had an option for Windows XP. So that actually is a legitimate possibility. Yeah. Yeah. It's an interesting word. Well, we'll go ahead and roll this out. I will just say that if anybody out there in listener land, if youall decide to stick your toe into this and you get stuck, just, you know, reach out through the podcast, three Instagram, you

can go to our contact sheet on mofpodcast.com and in the subject line, Phil, please help. And I'll, I'll point you in the right direction as best I can. I'm not a genius at this. I just figured it out the hard way through multiple repetitions and beating my face against a wall. So I might be able to help you figure it out too, but just, you know, patience and whiskey. Patience and perseverance.

Mostly whiskey. Little bit of perseverance. A lot of perseverance, a little bit of patience. There you go. All right. Well, MatterFacts podcast going out the door until next week. Thanks again to the patrons for giving us the green light to back up the recording time and the release date for the audio podcast. You're going to allow this man to get into bed at a half decent

hour and I will get this edited and chopped up and it'll go out Saturday morning. And if you're listening to this Anywhere except the audio podcast it'll start coming out Saturday morning If you're listening to this on the audio podcast wonder why it's a day late. That's why blame my work. Not me Talk to you later guys. Bye tonight I'm gonna go ahead and do a little bit of a The you