Things you can do with a Software Defined Radio (2024)

I was informed maybe 7 or 8 years back that my electric company would be replacing my analog meter with a smart one and always intended to try and glean more information about my electric consumption habits from it. It took me a lot longer than I intended, but last year I finally bought an RTL-SDR in the hopes of being able to get realtime info from the meter. Unfortunately, it seems that it's not one of the ones that emits consumption info over ISM bands for consumption by household appliances (so far as I can tell) and I ended up only capturing info from TPMS sensors off of passing cars (which was cool, but not really what I was looking for).

Do note that if you purchase an RTL-SDR these days, you'll probably get a v4 which, at least as of last year, does not play out-of-the-box at all with the software available on the Ubuntu apt repos and the RTL-SDR drivers that ship with 24.04 out-of-the-box — there were some hardware protocol/interface changes between v3 and v4 that make the old drivers incompatible and you'll get a litany of misleading or non-specific errors if you try without downloading and installing the latest drivers from GitHub (or somewhere).

I have a v5 and have had no issues with Fedora 42 btw. Worked out of the box.

When I was installing it I actually came across the Ubuntu installation notes only to find I didn't need to do any of those things on my systems.

I believe the v5 is a Nooelec and is comparable to the RTL v3. The RTL v4 is the latest chip. They both have different strengths and weaknesses tho.

https://www.onesdr.com/rtl-sdr-vs-nesdr-which-one-should-i-b...