Fast cheap AIS using $20 rtl-sdr DVB-T SDR dongles!

Well that´s easily worth under 30 quid with delivery. Even for just what it was built for :cool:

Does FM radio, digital radio and digital TV.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00813EW48/ref=oh_details_o00_s00_i00

Then got it to do a bit more with this..

http://www.rtlsdr.com/2012/04/getting-started-with-rtl-sdr-dongle/

some more..

http://www.hamradioscience.com/the-rtl2832u-elonics-e4000-sdr-radio-aka-the-20-sdr/

Seemed to work well enough even with the baby antenna which came with it, not played much yet though, but picked up the local buses fine. And kept crashing, so more work needed. Another downside is that to get it working on SDR it seems to overwrite the normal driver so won´t work again with the digiradio stuff without reloading the original driver. Maybe linux with gnuradio is a better option for the scanning stuff.

Might be a late few nights :)

http://www.n4jtc.com/?p=418

And a raspberry Pi arrived today, better than christmas :cool:

But no monitor adaptor :(
 
colhel said:
If you use it for AIS where would it get the signal from? ie do you need VHF input or internet for instance?
Click to expand...

You can use it as a radio reciever from 50Mhz to about 2.2Ghz so it says.

Ais is somewhere around 170Mhz. So a decent antenna would help. I was picking up the local buses around 140Mhz with just the supplied little plastic aerial. Weather sats are around 137Mhz, might get something from them, I´ll post back if the steep learning curve linux goes well :)
 
colhel said:
If you use it for AIS where would it get the signal from? ie do you need VHF input or internet for instance?
Click to expand...

You will just need a suitable antenna to plug in. The tiny antenna that comes with it will be tuned to the UHF frequencies of digital TV for which it was intended and will not be much use for AIS. The VHF antenna on your boat would be ok - though you would have to make up an adaptor. However, this little tuner does not have any antenna splitter, so you could not simply share the VHF antenna between this tuner and your fixed marine VHF radio. Splitters can be purchased, but they are not cheap.

It will be interesting to see how well it copes with installation on a boat with a dedicated antenna - best to keep a fair separation between the two antennae since the input stage of this tuner may not be particularly well protected and could be damaged by the output power of the fixed VHF radio.
 
Update.
After spending ages messing about in Linux with HDR and HDSDR in windows, and without getting too far apart from frsutration, I came across this..

http://sdrsharp.com/

WHich seems to work a treat. Don´t even need to install it, runs stright from .exe. Just sort out the driver first.

So for under 30 quid you can have a 50Mhz to 2.2Ghz sdr reciever. Local taxis and buses, marine VHF all seem to get picked up OK. Much quicker to have a scan as you can see the peaks in the display and click on them.

Haven´t looked at ais yet, does seaclear decode audio?

But did get it picking up a weather satellite (noaa17) with a bust camera, so it can hear them, but dunno if the image will be any good. Will find out later.

So all in all good cheap fun. :cool: :D


PS It´s plugged into a 2m/70cm (144Mhz/433Mhz) ham antenna
 
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