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Sorry for the self-gloss post, but thought I would share what I’ve been up to and see if it rouses anyone else working in this space.
The attached image represents hours of work spread out over many months. It is a heat map of the radio band centered on two local AM broadcast stations in Nashua.
The good news is that it was created using open source software and hardware using the Hermes-Lite 2 software defined radio, the Raspberry Pi 4B computer (okay, mostly open source) and the Python programming language.
The less good news is it was not rendered in real time, I had to gather the data first then draw the heat maps later. Also, even though the hardware supports receiving more than two streams of data at a time with more bandwidth than I showed, the RPi4B hardware and the Python coding is pretty much at its limits doing this much work.
Regardless, it was a great learning exercise because I had to learn a lot more about all of the above components and in particular the limits of what all these things can do.
In particular, Python just isn’t a good tool to create separate data streams from the UDP packets produced by the radio. I’ll need to switch to a compiled language to do that part, and depending on how many streams I want to work with and what I want to do with them, I may end up with multiple RPis, one to split out the streams, others to do rendering or decoding as desired. And of course I can always try faster computers, but I like playing with RPis despite their limitations.
[url=https://ibb.co/Qf5R21K][img]https://i.ibb.co/xD40pR7/waterfall-2rx-48ksps.png[/img][/url]
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