software and you have an awesome hand-held, real-time spectrum analyzer.
Introduction Few weeks ago I gave a talk titled Software Defined Radios for VHF, UHF and SHF at the annual Danish VHF-meeting. My plan was to present the commonly available SDR hardware and software in a non-death-by-powerpoint way, and as an extra twist I have decided to bring a demo that would motivate people to move on beyond installing sdrsharp on a wintendo PC. I wanted to show people that with the availability of cheap SDR devices like the RTL2832U-based DVB-T dongles (aka. rtl-sdr) and affordable embedded computing devices like the Beaglebone, awesome things can be done even on a hobbyist budget.
The demo was to be an rtl-sdr based spectrum analyzer running on a Beaglebone and to prove my point I didn't start until 3 days before the talk. Thus, I had two evenings and one full day to create the spectrum analyzer and to prepare my talk. I knew it could be done since I already had librtlsdr compiled and running the Beaglebone – all I had to do was some FFT and a simple GUI.
Parts listHere is a complete list of hardware and software components.
Hardware: