Nooelec NESDR / Ham It Up + HDSDR Intro, 1/28/2015

About a week ago, I was re-researching ACARS decoding on the VHF aircraft band for a radio project. This once again led me to a little reading about ADS-B, and that lead me to a little side-research about how to receive and decode ADS-B signals. Alas, I quickly turned to the dark side of the force and discovered a new, totally sinister fascination: affordable SDRs!! I'd never heard of such a thing before, but there it all was in front of me; $20 SDR units that plug into a USB port, and with the help of FREE software, not only decode ADS-B very effectively, but also let you tune everything else from 24MHz to an astonishing 1700MHz. I had not been so seduced by radio since the old days when I thought that putting down $600 for an AR8200 MkII was the best idea ever. In short order, I'd blown my first $50 on eBay on a Nooelec NESDR 1, some misc adapters and cables and the aluminum enclosure for the SDR unit. Not long after that, I blew another $70 or so on the Ham It Up Upconverter, also from Nooelec, and some more misc cabling and adapters so that I could set it up the way I wanted without any additional delays. It's been a bit less than a week since everything finally finished arriving, and in that short time I've been all over the various radio bands like a cheap suit.. like white on rice... like fried on chicken. So, I know what you want to know. "Is it fun? Is it worth it? Would you have spent as much if you'd known what you were getting into?" Emphatic yes, emphatic double yes, and hell, if I had to spend double for this amount of sheer coolness, I definitely would. What fun, omg. Just the waterfall spectral view and the power it yields makes you feel like some kind of a CIA spook in a radio surveillance van. You can get so much done in so little time, that's one thing. Another is how much you experience, how much you learn from it, and how many things you see that make you ponder and wonder. It's truly amazing, and if only I'd had something like this back in the late 80's / early 90s when I was in my heyday of snooping on every little radio signal. Even now in 2015, it's astonishing. If you ever loved radio listening, like as in scanners and transceivers and shortwave radios and such, you will be positively bowled over by this new thing. GO FOR IT. :-) This video is a first step, just a little tour of some of the HF spectrum with my setup. Next will be a tour of the hardware itself, including the SDR and Ham It Up upconverter, how it's powered and connected, and the antenna system and the simple RF LNA that I made for it. Following *that* video, I am planning to do a couple more detailing how to configure various things in the software, and some more advanced things like decoding HF digital modes, how to grab NOAA weather satellite images from VHF, how to decode VHF and UHF digitally encoded voice, how to setup an ADS-B decoding / mapping station, and etc. Lots of ground to cover with this technology! See you there! :-) RIck NR417