Applications using RTL-SDR: a revisit after two years

Two years have been passed from my last serious exploration using a cheap RTL TV receiver. I still remember my self trying to found a connector from the Canadian antenna to European type connector. I couldn't find my Lifeview LV5T Deluxe usb that i bought last time, so i bought a new one, this time a HAMA DVB-T based on the FC0013. The reception is similar with my old lifeview stick, however a noticed worse performance when going over 800 MHz. The time has come again to see if something changed in the field of applications that support the RTL receivers.

Last weeks i have used four different applications, so here is my opinion and some screenshots:

1. SDR# (SDRSharp)

One of my favorites when i 'm using windows. The newest version has been improved considerably from the last time i used it. The application was open source, but unfortunately the programmer switched to closed source, but it is still free to download.

2. HDSDR

This was the first SDR application i have ever used. I remember two years ago the performance of the application was really bad. In the next release things got better, but still it was far away from SDR#. My experience even trying simple FM radio channels is still bad. Limited options about the bandwidth.

3. SDR-RADIO.COM V2

I tried this application from curiosity. It suppose to be the most complex from all others. The problem is not in the complexity of the application, but in the bad GUI design, compared with the other applications. It is not bad choice, but the interface need improvement.

4. GQRX

This is totally open source. It is fast, but looks simpler compared with the other applications. I would expect smoother controls from what is now. It is a pain in the back if you want to compile it in old version of the Ubuntu, due to dependencies in the GNU radio.

Overall i will choose SDR#. It has the best interface and it is one of the fastest available. SDR-RADIO V2 is not bad, but needs some work on the GUI. Avoid using HDSDR, it is still limited when using RTL based chips, although the author has improved the performance. GQRX is simple and fast in Linux and it is available in the repositories if you are using Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.

Processing Milky Way in RawTherapee

This text is an analysis of a video I did some months ago how to process photos of our Milky Way in RawTherapee. You can find the picture here . The photo was taken by wiegemalt. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Editing: Step 1: Fixing lighting The first thing someone notices when opening the picture is the extreme noise due to high ISO used (1600 - check the picture on the right). The first thought is to de-noise the picture, however, if you do that you are going to loose the details of the night sky. The main reason for the high noise is the additional exposure Rawtherapee adds when the 'Auto' button is pressed. In particular, the RT adds +2.4 EV to equalize the picture. This is Wrong! What we want is to keep the noise down and at the same time bring the stars up. That's why we are going to play with the Tone Curve of the RT. To adjust the light properly we increase the cont

Static linking with gcc and g++

In this tutorial, we will explain what the static linking is, how this affect the size of final binary, and why statically linking with g++ sometimes is pain. By definition, a statically compiled binary is a group of programmer ‘s routines, external functions, and variables which are packed into the final binary executable. The compiler or the linker produces the final object and embeds all the functions and variables and the linking phase. There are two reasons of using dynamic linking and shared libraries: 1) Avoid creating a huge binary, if all the programs use a standard set of libraries why not having the operating system providing to them 2) Compatibility on operating system and machine dependant characteristics: sometimes the libraries must be implemented based on the architecture or the operating system and using dynamic linking is an easy way to avoid this catch. On the other hand, static linking is the ideal way of distributing one software product, paying

Homemade NAS after two and half years

Few years ago, I created a NAS system using my old PC. The old pc is powerful enough to do the basic NAS operation except real time transcoding of 4K or more than one 1080 streams. The setup was setup as follows: 1 SSD 128 GB for boot device 2x 4 TBs for the main storage configured as RAID 1 The hard disks were from different manufacturers (WD red plus and Segate) to avoid catastrophic situations: disks are part of a bad batch and you will have a second failed disk during the build of the RAID array. Here is a list of my mistakes: My first mistake was CentOS. I wanted a stable machine without surprises, unexpected behavior, as much less bugs affecting my setup. I had three free/open source options: Open Media Vault: Debian based Linux with many configuration options. The main downside is that you don't have support for ZFS and you have to very often use the command line to fix things. Moreover, there are a plethora of open issues/bugs that can make your life harder than expected

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