Stealing cars and ringing doorbells with radio

audacity-am-zoom

The cheap software defined radio platforms that can be built out of a USB TV tuner aren't getting much love on the Hackaday tip line of late. Thankfully, [Adam] sent in a great guide to cracking sub-GHz wireless protocols wide open, and ringing doorbells, opening cars, and potentially setting houses on fire in the process. The first wireless hack [Adam] managed to whip up is figuring out how a … [Read more...]

Listening in on weather balloons with RTL SDR

sonde

Every day, twice a day, over 800 weather balloons are launched around the world at exactly the same time. The data transmitted from these radiosondes is received by government agencies and shared with climatologists and meteorologist to develop climate models and predect the weather. Near [Carl]'s native Auckland, a weather balloon is launched twice a day, and since they transmit at 403 MHz, he … [Read more...]

Pictures from weather satellites with a USB TV tuner

europe

Several times a day, a NOAA weather satellite passes over your head, beaming down pictures of weather systems and cloud formations. These transmissions aren't encrypted, and given the requisite hardware it's possible for you to download these images from space as [Lovro] shows us in a tutorial video. To get these near real-time satellite pictures, [Lovro] used one of those USB TV tuners we've … [Read more...]

Still more software defined radio fun on the Mac

Cocoa Radio

Even though the world of software defined radio started out as a Linux-only endeavor, several recent software releases have put the ball fully into the court of OS X users. [hpux735]'s new Cocoa Radio release provides a (nearly) fully functional software defined radio for anyone with a USB TV tuner and a mac. Earlier this week, we saw (and tested)  [Elias]‘ port of gqrx and were … [Read more...]

OS X port of gqrx is the easiest way to get into software defined radio

sdr

Many have tried to put together an easy package for running software defined radio packages on the Mac. Not many have succeeded the way [Elias]' port of the gqrx SDR package has. It's simply the easiest way to get a software defined radio up and running on the mac. gqrx is a front end for the very popular GNU Radio software defined radio toolkit. Originally designed for the FUNcube SDR dongle, … [Read more...]

Hackaday links: September 7, 2012

slide

MakerSlide, European edition We're all familiar with the MakerSlide, right? The linear bearing system that has been turned into everything from motorized camera mounts to 3D printers is apparently very hard to source in Europe. A few folks from the ShapeOko forum have teamed up to produce the MakerSlide in the UK. They're running a crowdsourced project on Ulule, and the prices for the rewards … [Read more...]

Real time GPS decoding with software defined radio

GPS

In case the Realtek RTL2832u-based USB TV tuner dongle isn't useful enough, the folks behind a project to get a software defined GPS receiver off the ground successfully plotted GPS data in real-time with this very inexpensive radio. Previously, we've seen these dongles grab data from GPS satellites - useful if you're building a GPS-based clock - but this build required hours of data … [Read more...]