I Developed a rf noise monitoring system and there was a need to standardize on an active antenna for the system.
My thinking was sins most Remote Stations is Raspberry Pi with RTL-SDR dongles I felt developing a front end power injector with Galvanic isolation from active antenna with the necessary RF filters.
I also had a requirement to resolve the rtl-sdr dongle front end filter problem.
There is an Rf image on center frequency 14.2 Mhz.
I then Developed a Low and High band pass filters on the same PI HAT that can be switched via IO pins on Pi.
Here is the circuit diagram of my design with out the Active Antenna.
Raspberry Pi HAT with Filters,Isolation and Power injection
Filter design details.
High Pass Filter
Low Pass Filter
I will work on an active Antenna board.
PCB View
3d view of Board
3D View of Boards
RF Noise Filter HAT for Raspberry Pi
Video of My first Test
All seems to work fine will add spectrum Analyses details.
HF Noise monitoring system running from Live Ubuntu USB flash drive.
Ubuntu Live Noise Monitoring system with Persistence. 16Gb
I wanted a Preconfigured RF Noise monitoring system that I can run on my Laptop when ever I am not using it for something else.
I made this Ubuntu 16.04 Live memory stick .
So how dose it work?
Configure your BIOS to boot from USB flash drive and you should then see the following screens.
Just pres enter to continue
If you see the error above just pres Enter You should then get a screen where you can select how you want to boot your environment Persistent or not.
Select the Persistent live boot.
Select the Persistent live option.
You could then see a screen for a few seconds looking like this.
Black screen before startup
This picture is of Ubunto 17.10 The Noise system is on Ubuntu 16.04
Here is some of the sunscreens of some of the functionality
The HF noise monitoring system takes a 1Mhz bandwidth samples every 2 minutes using the rtl_power utility and save the measurements in a CVS fie.
The 2 minute scheduling is done with a Crontab calling a script in the hf_noise directory.
The RF Samples is taken at a 1Mhz bandwidth from 1M to 30Mhz therefore 29 of the CVS files is created and gets appended as the measurements is made.
A Perl script utility is the executed from a cron scedular to read the 29 CSV files and import there data into a RRD database.
The RRD database then gets interrogated by another Perl script scheduled by a cronjob to generate the graph Images and and html files and get saved in the Apache web server graph directory witch is the exposed on http://localhost/hf_noise/graph/1Mhz_Power.php
The RRD database will then create the Hourly, Daily,Weekly,Monthly and Yearly averages and then generates the graphs every 2 minutes according to the parameters passed to Database.
The generated graphs is then displayed in a php page via a Apache web server with an php plugin on the following url http://localhost/hf_noise/graph/1Mhz_Power.php.
Trends can then be seen on a graphs over time.
The heat map is generated by a python script from different CSV files and is saved in the /var/www/hf_noise/images directory and can be accessed on the local web server on the following url http://localhost/hf_noise/images
The systems has a static IP by default on Ethernet 192.168.10.200 and 192.168.10.205 on wifi if you have wifi dongle installed. You can change it to your ip
Here is a list of RRD database management tips
How to backup my RRD db data?
use rrdtool dump hf_noise.rrd > filename.xml to export the data to XML format.
How to Restore my RRD db data?
Transfer the XML dump to the target system. Run rrdtool restore [--range-check|-r] [--force-overwrite|-f] filename.xml filename.rrd to create a new RRD from the XML dump. See rrdrestore for details.
How to change some of the the RRD db data?
Use rrdtool dump to export RRD files to XML. Open the XML file, find and edit the bad data. Restore the RRD file using rrdtool restore.
How to generate a brand new RRD db?
There is an script in the hf_noise directory called create_rrd_db.sh
You can just run this script in the hf_directory sudo ./create_rrd_db.sh
#change to hfnoise user with the following command. (dont try to install with other users) su - hfnoise #enter your new password sudo apt-get update #If you get this error below do the following #** (appstreamcli:2761): CRITICAL **: Error while moving old database out of the way. AppStream cache update failed.
#then run this command and try again sudo chmod -R a+rX,u+w /var/cache/app-info/xapian/default #now lets upgrade and get some coffie :-)
sudo upgrade #We now need to install git to download the noise monitoring application sudo apt-get install git sudo apt install cmake sudo apt-get install libusb-1.0-0-dev sudo apt install python-setuptools sudo easy_install pip sudo pip install image cd #for ubuntu 17.10 do the following. wget http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/universe/i/imageinfo/imageinfo_0.04-0ubuntu11_amd64.deb sudo dpkg -i ./imageinfo_0.04-0ubuntu11_amd64.deb # for Ubuntu 16.04 do the following wget http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/universe/i/imageinfo/imageinfo_0.04-0ubuntu10_amd64.deb sudo dpkg -i ./imageinfo_0.04-0ubuntu10_amd64.deb cd
#git clone git://git.osmocom.org/rtl-sdr.git
#Please make sure you use this repository as the osmond one dont support direct conversion mode git clone https://github.com/keenerd/rtl-sdr.git cd rtl-sdr/ mkdir build cd build cmake ../ make sudo make install sudo ldconfig ls sudo vi /etc/modprobe.d/no-rtl.conf
#add the following
blacklist dvb_usb_rtl28xxu blacklist rtl2832 blacklist rtl2830 #reboot
#we now need to install an application that will allow us to reset the USB
port where the rtl dongle is installed if it locks up for some reason
(this has append when there is lightning in the aria.So what i do is
motor if the csv file get updated if not I reset the usb port with this
utility. cd git clone https://github.com/jkulesza/usbreset.git cd usbreset
#lets compile the application cc usbreset.c -o usbreset
#we now need to establish witch usb port is your rtl dongle installed. sudo lsusb
#we now need to edit the shell script that monitor the csv file update with your rtl usb port details.
#now look for the device with this name "Realtek Semiconductor Corp.
RTL2838 DVB-T" in my case it was "Bus 003 Device 004" to be like E.g
sudo /home/hfnoise/usbreset/usbreset /dev/bus/usb/003/004 cd git clone https://github.com/antonjan/hf_noise.git cd hf_noise cd sh
vi or use your editor and check_if_file_was_updated.sh
change the line that looks like this "vi /home/anton/Downloads/usbreset/usbreset /dev/bus/usb/"
002/005" with your detail
#pull the noise monitoring system from github git clone https://github.com/antonjan/hf_noise.git
#install Apache2 server sudo apt-get install apache2 sudo systemctl start apache2.service sudo systemctl enable apache2.service sudo apt install php7.1 libapache2-mod-php7.1 sudo a2enmod php7.1 sudo systemctl restart apache2 cd /var/www/html sudo mkdir hf_noise sudo mkdir hf_noise/graph sudo mkdir hf_noise/images cd hf_noise/graph sudo cp -r /home/hfnoise/hf_noise/*.php ./ sudo cp -r /home/hfnoise/hf_noise/*.html ./ sudo cp -r /home/hfnoise/hf_noise/*.png ./ cd /var/www/html/hf_noise/images sudo cp -r /home/hfnoise/hf_noise/image/*.php ./ sudo cp -r /home/hfnoise/hf_noise/image/*.html ./ sudo cp -r /home/hfnoise/hf_noise/image/*.jpg ./ sudo cp -r /home/hfnoise/hf_noise/image/thumb ./ #now test if hfnoise webserver work. firefox http://localhost/hf_noise
#you should see the index page with no pictures.
#We now need to install the heatmap application.
#lets go to home directory and install heatmap cd
#got hf_noise directory and install heatmap by git from github cd hf_noise
#Get the heatmap python progrm from github git clone https://github.com/keenerd/rtl-sdr-misc.git cd /home/hfnoise/hf_noise/rtl-sdr-misc/heatmap #give the application execution writes chmod 776 *.py
#Now we need to install the perl librareries
#CPAN, the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network, is the primary source for #publishing and fetching the latest modules cd sudo apt-get install perl build-essential curl sudo apt-get install rrdtool sudo apt-get install librrds-perl cd /usr/local/bin sudo wget https://raw.github.com/miyagawa/cpanminus/master/cpanm sudo chmod +x cpanm cd sudo cpanm --self-upgrade --sudo
#sudo apt-get install cpanminus sudo cpanm Text::Trim sudo cpanm Text::CSV sudo cpanm Date::Manip sudo cpanm Text::Trim
# mite be only trim sudo cpanm RRD::Simple cd cd hf_noise cd sh #run then script to generate rrd db chmod 776 create_rrd_db.sh ./create_rrd_db.sh
#Ok now connect your HF dongel to your laptop usb port and connect to an antenna.
#Ok now everything should be ready.
#we need to enable the scripts in the crontab (scheduler)
#run the script to setup the scheduler sudo python ./create_crontab.py
#If you want to see how the crontab was setup you can check with this command sudo crontab -e
#Below is the what you should see 0,5,10,15,20,25,30,35,40,45,50,55 * * * *
/home/hfnoise/hf_noise/sh/create_heatmap.sh 0,2,4,6,8,10,12,14,16,18,20,22,24,26,28,30,32,34,36,38,40,42,44,46,48,50,52,54,56,58
* * * * /home/hfnoise/hf_noise/sh/run_hf_noise_monitor_and_graph.sh 1,6,11,16,21,26,31,36,41,46,51,56 * * * *
/home/hfnoise/hf_noise
#save file and now and we are now done.
#The images and history file should now be automatically being created every 5 minutes.
#Make sure you have along wire antenna
connected to your HF rtl dongle to hf noise recordings.
#********************end******************
#How can I check that data is collected.
#run the command ls -lrt /home/hfnoise/hf_noise
#you should see somthing lyk this
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Nov 8 19:06 hf_monitoring_08-11-2017.cvs
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Nov 8 19:06 hf_monitoring_graph_08-11-2017.cvs
You should also see graph images in you browser. firefox http://localhost/hf_noise/graph/1Mhz_Power.php
File upload to Master Analytics site will be available when it goes alive.
got to the newly created directory gnuradio when the cloning is done
cd gnuradio
make a build directory
mkdir build
goto the build directory
cd build
Compile gnuradio
cmake ../
if you get an error-- WARNING: Found a known bad version of Boost (v104601). Disabling.
Then run cmake -DENABLE_BAD_BOOST=True ../
This can take a couple of hours depending on the speed of you Linux server.
make
Now install the newly compiled binaries into the required directories
sudo make install
Now load the the gnu drivers
sudo ldconfig
Build and Install RTL-SDR drivers go to your favorite install directory
cd ../../../
get the latest source code from osmocom.org
git clone git://git.osmocom.org/rtl-sdr.git
go to the newly created directory
cd rtl-sdr/
Now compile the rtl drivers
create the build directory
mkdir build
go to the build directory
cd build
compile the code
cmake ../
make
now install the compiled binaries
sudo make install
load the drivers
sudo ldconfig
now copy the content of the file rtl-sdr.rules and append it to the /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-cd.rules file
use your favorite editor
vi rtl-sdr.rules and copy the content.
then open the file /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-cd.rules
sudo vi /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-cd.rules and append the previous files content at the end in ubuntu 16.04 the file name was /etc/udev/rules.d/rtl-sdr.rules
This is how my file looked like
# This file maintains persistent names for CD/DVD reader and writer devices.
# See udev(7) for syntax.
#
# Entries are automatically added by the 75-cd-aliases-generator.rules
# file; however you are also free to add your own entries provided you
# add the ENV{GENERATED}=1 flag to your own rules as well.
Building and Install Gqrx with command line. git clone https://github.com/csete/gqrx.git gqrx.git cd gqrx.git mkdir build cd build cmake .. make sudo make install
If you want to build the code using the Qt development environment then follow the steps below cd ../../
git clone https://github.com/csete/gqrx.git
cd gqrx
qtcreator ./gqrx.pro
A new window will open (the QT compiler).
When it opens click the build menu then the build all option.
QT Compiler
you should see The process "/usr/bin/make" exited normally.
Plug in your RTL dongle.
Now run gqrx.
gqrx
Select Yes
GQRX Should now be open. On the first run you will be prompted for a device listing.
Select your SDR (in my case RTL dongle)
In the device drop down menu select "ezcap USB 2.0 DVB-T/DAB/FM Dongle", then continue to the main GQRX window.
Select File->Start DSP. You should now be receiving something.
Tune to a local radio station between 88-108Mhz FM.
select Wide FM Stero as the Mode Type.
Now connect a proper external antenna to your RTL dongle or Softrock HF/VHF kit.
Hope you have lost of fun ;-)
Here is a video of GQRX using the 100Khz to 17Ghz RTL dongle in direct conversion mode.
How to configure your direct conversion dongle.
Here is the screen-shot of the configuration on Linux for Gqrx
Device Select other
Device String rtl=0,direct_sample=2 (possibly 0/1/2)(This number could differ depending on which pin was wired via balin)
Device String rtl=0,direct_sample=2
Here is a picture of the 100KHX to 1.7Ghz rtl dongle
