Palomar Amateur Radio Club STEM Experimentation Lab
At Home SDR Labs and Projects
These are projects and labs that can be set up and run at home. In most cases they only require obtaining and hooking up an SDR and installing SDR software on your own PC. You can even make a portable station by using a laptop or a Raspberry Pi. There are a number of SDRs that are inexpensive and work quite well. For example the STEMLab's RTL-SDR Blog devices cost around $30. GNU Radio is sophisticated and capable free software.
- OpenWebRX by Jakob Ketterel 🔗 OpenWebRX software repository
The original OpenWebRX project. - OpenWebRX+ by Marat Fayzullin 🔗 OpenWebRX+ software repository
This is a fork of the original OpenWebRX project and is the application that we use for the PARC STEMLab. - GNU Radio ⓘ GNU Radio Information
A very sophisticated suite of tools for radio project development. It provides software simulators in addition to being able to use actual SDR hardware. - ADS-B Broadcast Monitoring 🔗 FlightAware's piaware
An open-source ADS-B application you can easily set up at home. - Airband Voice Monitoring 🔗 RTL-SDR Airband
An open-source program for monitoring Airband voice communications using RTL-SDRs. This project is maintained and active today.
• More Airband Voice Information ⓘ Airband Voice Communications - Satellite Communications ⓘ Amateur Satellite Communications Information
This offers a fascinating angle to the amateur radio hobby. The cost of entry is pretty low, requiring at minimum just a VHF/UHF radio and a handheld antenna.
⇒ SDR Applications ⓘ SDR Application Information
Installing any of the many applications will give you various capabilities for your SDR hardware. There ia a selection of applications on the SDR Applications page. These are only a small subset of the available software.
⇒ Installing your own low-cost SDR ⓘ SDR Installation
Note: PARC does not sell or endorse any products mentioned in these pages.
Information is provided for education and instructional purposes only.