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Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] SDR for beginners (if not quite "dummies")
From: |
Bruce Ferrell |
Subject: |
Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] SDR for beginners (if not quite "dummies") |
Date: |
Sun, 2 Dec 2018 11:03:35 -0800 |
User-agent: |
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:60.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/60.2.1 |
On 12/2/18 3:47 AM, Colin Rowat wrote:
I'm looking for an interesting Christmas present for my sons (ages 13 and 10) and wondered about software-defined radio. We're reasonably tech literate, but don't have any SDR
experience.
I'd thought that it could be interesting for them to see what sort of signals
are passing through the air around us, and even identify and listen to some of
them.
I'd love something that:
1.is easy to use and can give an immediate reward out of the box - e.g. tuning
into something they couldn't otherwise hear, or transmitting to walkie-talkies
in the area.
2.allows room to grow, so that they can do more serious things with it if
they're interested
3.can be used from an Android phone or a Raspberry Pi (nice, but not essential)
4.not too expensive
Thus, I think I'd need both SDR hardware and an intro-level book/manual.
I'd be grateful for any suggestions about how to get started with SDR.
Thank you,
Colin
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Collin,
Up until about two weeks ago I was looking for exactly what you're asking for... And I've
been a/ Electronics/radio/Linux "person" since high school in the 70's!
While How-to-obtain/build is great... And too much of the on-line stuff stops at how to obtain/build OR dives directly off into deep mathematics. Neither of those are very useful
in how to use/get started.
Then I found this set of tutorials on YouTube to be extraordinarily useful:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRovDyowOn5F67h9nHN4RWqmvXyt18uj8
The cheapest SDR you can lay you hands on is an RTL-SDR v3 at about $25... It
can ONLY be a receiver, but you can get going listening. It was my first.
My second was the SDRplay one. I got rid of it as it's Linux driver was closed... It was only available as a binary for very particular Linux distros and they weren't the ones I
was using. They spent a year saying they would build for other distros and never did... Vexing.
I then found the BladeRF, which I like but I have it in use in a semi-dedicated
role.
I also play around with the ADALM-Pluto from analog devices. This one is
interesting in that it also has a built in Linux host
My next, when I have spare money, will probably be a LimeSDR or LimeSDR-mini
Good luck!