Low-cost software defined radio (RTL2832 SDR) community

Been compiling an open-source SDR/RF tools list (passive radar, KrakenSDR direction finding, GNSS interference detection, ADS-B, Remote ID) — would love corrections

2026-06-09T13:05:54+00:00

I've been compiling a curated list of open-source RF/SDR tools and it's grown enough that I figured this is the right crowd to sanity-check the radio side of it.

Full disclosure up front: Its broader scope is defense/dual-use sensing (drones, GEOINT, C2, and so on), so the link reflects that. But a big chunk of it is straight SDR/RF tooling that's useful regardless of what you point it at.

Passive radar — blah2 (real-time SDR passive radar; runs on KrakenSDR, USRP, SDRplay; delay-Doppler maps in a web dashboard), plus a few other passive/MIMO radar projects.
Direction finding — KrakenSDR's DoA stack (MUSIC on the 5-channel coherent receiver) and DF Aggregator for triangulating bearings from multiple networked Kraken/Kerberos units onto a live map.
GNSS interference — GNSS-SDR and a fork focused on spoofing detection and jamming detection/cancellation — timely given how much GPS interference is getting reported lately.
Signal detection / classification — a couple of SIGINT-style monitoring/decoding projects (sigint, iNTERCEPT), some with ATAK output.
Drone Remote ID — receivers that sniff Remote ID over Wi-Fi/BLE and map the drones, if that's your thing.
Plus the usual suspects (GNU Radio, Gqrx, SDR++, OpenWebRX+, SigMF) and an ADS-B section, mostly there for completeness.

https://github.com/Ibtisam-Mohammad/awesome-defense

What I'd actually value from you: anything obvious I'm missing (especially mature, actively-maintained tools), entries that are stale or abandoned and should be cut, and any categories that are too broad. Corrections from people who actually run this stuff are gold.

Thanks!

submitted by /u/Remarkable-Ad-2286
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I have a question about P25 system

2026-06-10T00:39:01+00:00

I have a question about P25 system I am wondering how I can get Alias on enter them in on sential it’s Ottawa system

submitted by /u/ExplorerNo6392
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Listening to OAK international airport

2026-06-09T01:21:14+00:00

Im very new to all this, Im trying to listen to OAK atc, Ive tried lots of different frequency's I've found around the internet within the airband, non of which have gotten me any results. I am very close to the airport ~4 miles, weirdly enough, if I switch from AM to WFM there are tons of Radio channels that I can hear extremely clearly from way lower in the spectrum, I was searching around 121.3 and was hearing 96.5fm. Im just very confused please advise. Im using a nooelec sdr v5 on windows 11 with sdr++. Thanks for any advice :)

submitted by /u/shaboonamatata
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Beta testers needed — ATC Frequencies app for Android

2026-06-09T09:05:52+00:00

Hello everyone,

I've been working on an app idea for a while now and after many bumps along the road, it's come to fruition. It's a simple app, no adverts, it just allows you to see airband radio frequencies easily with no fuss for your chosen airport. I'm a plane spotter, and have run into issues many times where after a google, the information on frequencies to listen to has been incorrect, and this app solves that.

It has the ability to remotely tune some radios with SDR Touch if it's already installed on your phone, link out to liveatc.net if you are too far away and it is legal to listen in your country, with the plans of in future being able to handle the SDR aspect itself in the app. Other features include dark and light mode can be set either by preference or follow the system, a persistent notification showing the frequencies of an airport of your choice so you do not need to have the app open to see or change frequencies on your personal radio.

Would anyone be willing to test and critique this for me? This is my first foray into app development so any feedback would be gratefully received. You can either let me know here, file a bug in the settings page, or just shake your phone to give feedback. The Play Store link takes you to Google's internal testing pages which is a requirement before an application hits production. If you have any questions regarding installing please feel free to ask.

Thank you for your time!

Update - now working! It is expected to not see any conversations in the Google Group, it simply means I did not have to ask everyone for their email address.

Update 2 - Working, but I have been informed the app is showing as charging. This is certainly not intended when in beta. Due to nuances with Google, I cannot swap back to free, however as of the 10th June, the app goes on sale with 100% off for 20 days so it can be beta tested for free. You should however, be able to follow the steps below in order, and it should say the app is free.

Join the tester group : https://groups.google.com/g/atc-frequencies-beta-testers
Open this link on your phone: https://play.google.com/apps/testing/com.atcfreq.atc_freq
Tap "Become a tester" this should then let you download the app

Edited to update links

submitted by /u/Green-Switch9307
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It's a 84cm TV dipole on each antenna is good for what?

2026-06-08T14:41:00+00:00

In my country it's very hard to find a good antenna for SDR, so I found a dipole that looks like a old antenna for radio or TV. It is good for anything?

submitted by /u/Short_Still4386
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Looking for ADSB Small Anteena

2026-06-08T04:28:24+00:00

Hey everyone I am looking for small ADSB anteena which can be carried easily and and portable as Plane finder standard desktop anteena but I am unable to find any online and offline all I am getting is wifi anteena. Can anyone help in finding that or from where I can get it.

submitted by /u/Q1ess
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More RTL 433 fun

2026-06-07T16:21:23+00:00

the usual meters and a Compustar car remote starter, must have good range, I didn't actually hear any cars starting

submitted by /u/Own_Event_4363
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Meteor M2-3/4 Trouble

2026-06-08T04:04:31+00:00

submitted by /u/_Simhosha_pro1
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SDR for MIMO radar demonstrator

2026-06-07T16:52:31+00:00

Hello,

On my masters thesis I created an FMCW MIMO/SIMO radar on modified ADALM-PLUTO. It sparked my interest so i want to expand on it. Because ADALM-PLUTO was university provided so i have to give it back, thus i am looking for an SDR. I was thinking about getting some Chinese PLUTO close based on AD936x and Zynq, so the current project will be easily transferable and I will be able to find support quite easily. But also i was thinking about getting SDR with wider bandwidth like ones based on AD9371 or ADRV9009 made by OpenSourceSDRLab. For now the plan is to try to make a noise radar with selected SDR.

Does any of you have experience with such wider bandwidth SDRs?
Is it worth getting a chinese clone with AD936x with build in PAs?
Do you have any other suggestions for something under 500$? But if it was to be AD936x i'd rather stay in 200$ budget range

Am I also very curious for your insight if you tried doing anything like it or have experience with SDRs, because I still feel like a beginner in those topics.

P.S. I was also considering premade radar eval boards like AWR1643 from TI, but after having a lovely experience with IMAGEVK-74 from Vayyar in my engineering thesis I am not really willing to go that way. And also i think SDR may be more versatile for other projects if i come up with any.

submitted by /u/jeorge_the_Waveguide
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ADSB on an RP2040 microcontroller!

2026-06-07T11:12:39+00:00

submitted by /u/CoolNamesAllTaken
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Radio OS Help

2026-06-07T16:27:18+00:00

submitted by /u/jack1sh3r3
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Any idea what i could do with it?

2026-06-06T14:48:38+00:00

It‘s a Quintech QE3 64x64 L-Band RF Matrix Switch

submitted by /u/MousseRemarkable
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Alphasat pirates

2026-06-06T22:05:09+00:00

https://preview.redd.it/gpd9hnfohq5h1.png?width=1366&format=png&auto=webp&s=710379071d93a566d50e4b85406b353eac021515

Pro Ukrainian propaganda music on Inmarsat 4A-F4. Not new in itself but its been months since i heard any pirates using the L-TAC system. They have been at it for some time as well.

I almost thought Inmarsat had managed to wipe them out as there were tons of them on there some years ago, then it suddenly fell quiet.

https://voca.ro/1141CsnOCOeQ

John

submitted by /u/Jomjom1979
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Is it possible to use a Coaxial TV Socket to receive radio?

2026-06-06T19:33:26+00:00

Hello,

I'm trying to work out whether I can use the Coaxial TV Socket just to receive radio using my already mounted TV Ariel.

The ariel is pointing towards Sheffield (UK) so I'd hope to find some interesting frequencies to listen in to.

This is the Coaxial TV Socket

I'm in the process of doing my amateur foundation licence so I'm still learning a lot and any advice will be greatly appreciated.

Thank you!

submitted by /u/Michal99S
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My first time capturing Meteor M2-4 with RTL-SDR v4

2026-06-05T20:03:17+00:00

submitted by /u/Extra-Hyena-9400
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is sdr++ safe??

2026-06-06T12:51:33+00:00

im trying out a new sdr software but im not sure if its safe

submitted by /u/Any_Explanation_1075
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What would you say about this SAW filter and LNA?

2026-06-05T20:05:40+00:00

Hello,

I bought a SAW Filter & LNA for the 70 cm band (433 MHz) and an analysis with my NanoVNA gives the following charts:

Figure 1: Filter powered off

Figure 2: Filter powered on

The 1st chart shows the result when the filter is not energized; the second, when it is powered on. Both show a noticeable plateau exactly in the range I'm intending to work, that is, the 70-cm band. Yet, shouldn't the powered-off chart (#1) show no plateau at all? After all, it is powered off and as such it shouldn't work.

Also, are the plateau values (-20 and -30 dB approximately) acceptable ones?

Thanks for any light you might shed on this matter.

submitted by /u/Upper-Photograph4124
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My end-fed wire's 24-hour reception map for 40m, learned from a month of logs (not a propagation sim)

2026-06-04T19:16:24+00:00

I monitored 40m continuously for about a month last year (July 2025, FT8) from JO20 with a roof end-fed random wire, then trained a small neural network (using the data from my ALL.TXT log file made by WSJTX and data sources about space weather and such from noaa, omniweb and wspr_live) on the decode log to estimate, for any point on Earth and any UTC hour, the probability that a path from my station is "open" (i.e. that I'd actually decode someone there).

The GIF is that model swept across all 24 UTC hours. Brighter = higher modeled probability of reception.

What surprised me is that I never encoded the greyline anywhere. The model only gets pointwise solar context (sun elevation, day/night, terminator-proximity along the path) and learns from my decodes which conditions actually correlate with reception.

In the GIF, the heat map is the model's hour by hour predictions and the actual decodes are shown as the green dots where their size signifies the decode volume. If you look closely you can see that the prediction is not perfect at all but it does show some interesting effects that do clearly somewhat correlate to the actual decodes

Take it with a grain of salt but it is a cool visual none the less.

All predictions are done only with actual decodes I received with my setup so basically this map only really shows a prediction for my own specific janky setup.

The model was trained using Pytorch.

submitted by /u/HorrorFrank
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A newbie question on setting up an RTL-SDR to capture GOES satellite feed.

2026-06-05T13:50:53+00:00

So I am new to the RTL-SDR world and picked up one of the NooElec V5 dongles and have been using it to do simple things like listen to FM stations and pickup and decode the ADS-B signals. All of this is pretty interesting to me.

Now I am thinking of setting up a dedicated system to pickup the GOES signals. I know I will need to pickup an LNA with GOES filtering and most likely a different RTL-SDR dongle. My question is more about the antenna itself. I know NooElec sells a bundle with the dish, LNA/Filter and receiver. I have thought about just picking up one of these, but I would like to keep this setup more inconspicuous. What I would like to do is make use of an unused DirecTV dish I already have. I know this would require modifying the LNB that is currently installed. I would rip everything out of the current LNB and just use it as a mechanical housing. I have access to some patch antennas that while tuned for GNSS, still function at 1.7 GHz.

So long story short here are my questions. I know that some the signals from GOES are linearly polarized and to maximize the signal reception I would need to tilt the antenna to the appropriate angle. Can I instead...

Tilt the antenna in the feed, keeping the dish straight?
Instead of using a linear polarized antenna in the feed, use an RHCP polarized antenna in the feed? I know there will be some loss due to polarization mismatch, roughly 3dB, but then I do not need to worry about tilt, especially if I want to aim the dish at a different satellite.

I would really like to use the RHCP antenna, as that just takes some of the guesswork out of aiming and since that is what GNSS uses there is no shortage of possible antennas to start with.

submitted by /u/schirmyver
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Using #MagScroll to adjust the Frequency of a #SDR radio with ease curre...

2026-06-05T07:15:36+00:00

Easily use the MagScroll to adjust the frequency of your SDR Radio software.

submitted by /u/iHayri
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SDR on gqrx with linux game console

2026-06-04T12:23:03+00:00

Recently I managed to install xfce and removed emulatorstation and runned gqrx, I use a rtl-sdr blog V4, now searching for a compact sdr mini usb for the device. Main goal is to be able to listen radio and to listen emergency broadcasts.

submitted by /u/CodeClean2172
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RTL-SDR V4

2026-06-05T02:10:26+00:00

submitted by /u/CodeClean2172
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I live in the take off path of SFO and built a ceiling projection mapping of the planes flying over my house using ADS-B radio

2026-06-03T11:16:11+00:00

submitted by /u/I_am_Root01
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RF spectrum visualization.

2026-06-03T14:59:19+00:00

It's more of a need than a want for me.

The Project came from one module of a moon bounce array.

https://moonrf.com/updates/

submitted by /u/East-Coasters
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on Anbernic RG-DS

2026-06-03T10:58:03+00:00

A friend sold me an Android-based emulator console called the RG-DS for half price.

https://anbernic.com/

Since I haven't created a DDR blob for the bootloader, I grafted Rocknix's bootloader to try booting Armbian, and it works so so.

Due to the rather mediocre RK3568 SoC and the unusual 640x480*2 resolution, performance isn't great. The analyzer runs at around 20 fps.

In conclusion: it's a quite lacking for use as a GUI application.

submitted by /u/NeighborhoodSad2350
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