UHF/VHF for the SDR noob

[kerpap]

OMG Darren and Shannon should not have shown me the RTL SDR :-( its like half-life 2, oblivion, skyrim and WOW all in 1

anyhoo

anyone can tell me how to listen to UHF/VHF in SDR#?

im a radio noob.

[etherxrally]

If you have SDR# installed and the rtl-sdr plugged in you would want to select the rtl-sdr/usb from the drop down menu by the play button then press play. Once you press play you and adjust the VFO (Variable Frequency Oscillator) to the frequency you are looking for which in your case you are probably looking for activity in the 140mhz-170mhz and 430-480mhz. Just a guess on the frequency range because you stated two whole frequency bands which covers a lot. if you wanted a example of VHF you could set the vfo to read: 0.162.500.000 which will be 162.5MHZ which is in the VHF band and there is a good chance you will find a weather station near that frequency. I hope that helps.

[OKJohnny]

Which "radio" type do I select for the weather station in SDR#.... I haven't been able to do anything with this so far except track planes - no AM/FM ..etc .. I went to the 162.500 MHz and see a spike there... and trying various of the radio buttons .. CW I get a strong tone ... all the rest of them either static or nothing at all. Obviously I have some trouble with something.. but not sure what.

I'm on a Windows 7 64 Bit... the dongle seems to be installed correctly ( I can track planes with scope) ... I have the antenna outside stuck on the side of my house.

Any suggestions appreciated.

[TN.Frank]

Not messed with SDR# but I have used Gqrx in my Kali Linux install and it's very simple to use. The dongle that the HakShop sells will get me from 24MHz to 1766MHz and I can do AM, Narrow FM(where NOAA Weather is broadcast at 162.398.000 for me) Wide FM Mono, Wide FM Stereo, USB(Upper Side Band) LSB(Lower Side Band) and CW-U and CW-L. Music and such is in the Wide FM band, roughly 88MHz to 109MHz., CB radio is around the 27MHz band, air traffic, from what I've noticed, is around 122MHz up to around 125MHz. and there's a lot of other stuff going on that I have no clue as to what it is but you can "see" it in the waterfall and wave form. Hope this helps.

Edited February 28, 2014 by TN.Frank

[etherxrally]

Just to go over some things: When I click on the configure button I set my device to what shows up as "ezcap USB 2.0 DVB-T/DVB/FM dongle" this isn't the dongle i have but the chip set is the same so the driver works. This should be what yours says. Also I have mine at 1.8 MSPS. You can pay with this a little. I found that its a good starting point. For sampling select quadrature sampling. So under the tuning section I select Offset tuning and moved the adjustment point to 36.4db or in that range. The AGC and offset tuning is something that will need to be played with. If the gain is set to high you will get overloading and signals will get washed out and hard to see. If you set it low you will not see anything. Play around with it and watch how signals react on the waterfall. So once you have that set up you can close that window and go back to the main screen. If you are looking for Local fire dept, Police, weather station etc... you will want to set the radio to NFM. If you are looking at broadcast set to WFM. I found that the filter type doesn't matter much for this. I have mine at Blackman-Harris. For now the filter you will want to set the filter bandwidth to 12500. I have my filter order set and 10 and to be honest I don't know much about what that does but if you make it more you get less signal. For now I would uncheck your squelch just to hear the static. Mine is on and set at 66 because my noise floor is at -60 to -65db at this frequency. step size is 12.5khz and I have the correct IQ set. That should take care of the radio side of tuning in to FM frequencies. The last step would be to make sure under the Audio section that you have the output set to your computer soundcard output. I hope that going over some of these steps will help.