/hamradio/ - Electronics

Search youtube for old US navey instructional radio videos. A little bit of basic knowledge will take you a long way!

cheers. attempting to sort aerial as I type.

>>353

Find out what connector is on the dongle side. It is probably something like mini-sma-female…. or something like that..

You will want to find the counterpart to it. Ex. mini-sma-male. Buying a premade antenna would be the way to go.

You should use different antennas for different bands. For best reception.

>>354

Yeah, need convertor to get it up to coax. Once there I can rig it to something more than bell wire and a stick wrapped in plastic.

Plugged it into my android and had DAB running, so that was eventful in a minor way. It works. baby steps and all taht.

>>351

Build a better antenna, the stock antenna is absolute shit.

>>354

The connector is MCX (if small) if large it is Belling-Lee, commonly known as "PAL".

The stick in op's picture has a MCX connector.

I would suggest getting a few MCX to F, MCX to BNC and MCX to SMA adapter cables on ebay. The cables are usually called "pigtails". And cables instead of adapters because the cables place less strain on the fragile connector.

You can find tons of antenna designs from here: http://www.dxzone.com/catalog/Antennas/

Next you have to start thinking about what you want to listen to. around 150Mhz (VHF) you can find commercial users and marine (155MHz) 118-135MHz has airplanes, 136MHz has weather satellites like NOAA, 144-148;Hz has radio amateurs, 27MHz has CB operators, over 450MHz has commercial users and under it is more hams. depending on the country 800MHz has either public service, cellphones, data, or licence free stuff.

What you can hear and where depends on your country.

After deciding on what you want to listen, you either buy or make an antenna for receiving it.

Currently using dump1090 with web-based front end for air traffic ads-b watching.

>little aerial I made works

Full of win!

>>370

Awesome!

dump1090 also worked for me.

I fucking fucked up my RTLSDR. It fell down and one of the inductors fell of the PCB.

Im about to buy a HackRF now. I'm also already bonered for the HackRF blue amplifier.

>>577

Please let me know how those perform if you get one. I got a FUNcube Pro+ before realizing that the updated HackRF can also see into the HF band. The FCP's main issues are the low sample rate making it tedious to scan with. It also seems to be totally blind around the 3-4MHz area.

>>356

Also yeah, even screwing a telescopic antenna into the base will improve reception dramatically. I've yet to try a real one.