GNU Radio first steps: a FM receiver

That is a good point that you don't need a radio but I work extensively with GNU Radio and I would do all of those experiments using MATLAB / Octave. GNU Radio is very much the wrong tool for that job.

I got one last week and have had good luck with [CubicSDR](https://cubicsdr.com/) which is brew installable, as well as decoding APRS packets from the command line using rtl_fm and multimon-ng

I'm hoping to figure out how to decode satellite pictures in the near future.

The Gnuradio bootable ISO in Parallels desktop (or simply installing Gnuradio in mint under Parallels) works fine with Parallels USB passthrough for an rtlsdr. I can’t say the same for Virtualbox’s broken USB support.

I have a rtlsdr dongle.. I don't know anything about gnu radio, but these are all useful, and using them isn't super complicated.

https://github.com/antirez/dump1090

https://github.com/bemasher/rtlamr

https://github.com/merbanan/rtl_433

There's always ADSB (plane traffic).

There are all sorts of interesting and useful things you can do with them: monitor/troubleshoot various AM devices around the house (weather stations, garage door openers etc), tune in to a number of amateur radio bands (there's surprising amount of traffic on them), receive NOAA weather broadcasts, aircraft broadcasts, debug DIY projects (433MHz transmitters etc.)... there's a lot of stuff being broadcast in the frequencies that these dongles can receive. You just need a decent antenna[1] and to explore the spectrum around you a bit.

Granted, the absolute most common cases are out of reach with the cheap dongles due to frequency, bandwidth and encryption issues (i.e. ATSC, Wifi, Bluetooth) So they're not going to be terribly interesting to the average consumer but they are very handy little devices for hackers with any interest in RF.

[1] The default antennas they ship are not useful over a wide range of frequencies and/or for weak signals

I was able to read my neighborhoods unencrypted power meter data within an hour of receiving my first rtlsdr. I also live under a flight path and found it pretty fun to listen to the pilots overhead obtain their landing clearances. Building a dish and downloading satellite images from NOAA or GOES also looks fun.

In a city house with many apartments there's a lot that can be received, produced either by you or by neighbors.

But you have to be interested in the topics, find the right tools to decode what you're interested etc.

As an example: with not too much effort I've been able to listen and read a number of the temperature sensors around sending their readings. Then if you collect them for some period of time, you can try to analyze and process them to figure out how much of "noise" they collected (as if when they are mounted outside of a window and the window is open during the winter) versus the real signal (the outside temperature), and how many are completely broken etc, all based only on the data (e.g. when not seeing all the devices you record and when not knowing their placement).

It is fun for somebody who is interested in such kind of experiments (but not everybody considers such experimentation fun -- and then no tutorial is enough).

We live in the times where there are still unencrypted signals around. in some future, maybe there won't be anything to listen that would mean anything without the keys -- everything will be just encrypted noise.

It's a damn shame the Icom IC-9700 doesn't support out of band RX

Is that your site? If so, please consider changing the "B612"/"B612 Mono" font to something else. The parenthesis in it look far too much like square brackets (at least as rendered by Firefox on Windows 10 with subpixel AA enabled on a standard DPI LCD monitor). In particular the default font makes the quoted Python code in the linked AM Modulation article almost unreadable (it took me a solid minute to realize you were calling math.sin/math.cos instead of trying to index them for some reason).

Why does your blog have so many ads? Is it really necessary?

Maybe actually. In some jurisdictions this would require a license from the government to do the reception. The UK is like this with their tv licenses for the BBC and similar. I can't imagine theyre the only ones like this. And then there's possibly compression technologies that might need to be licensed from the mpeg group, etc.

Setting aside legal/licensing issues, retrieving an MP2/MP4 (depending where in the world you are) stream via SDR would require massively more power both in terms of transferring the raw data to the CPU and processing to extract the signal from it. It also requires better hardware (IIRC ATSC, for example, requires >10-bit ADC while FM radio is fine with an 8-bit ADC.) So a SDR-based TV tuner would drain your phone battery quite quickly and still not work as well as a dedicated TV tuner streamed to your phone.

If that weren't enough, there's also the fact that the digital TV signals don't work well with moving antennas on the receiving end...

Some phones in Japan did (and maybe still do) have TV tuners even in the pre-smartphone days.

Michael Ossmann's video series is another great resource:

https://www.greatscottgadgets.com/sdr/