Basic Tactical SIGINT: Tracking Aircraft and SDR Scanning

signals intelligence or signant is a pretty big topic intercepting the signals whizzing through the air is something that is not easy and historically mostly been relegated to militaries around the world however with recent conflicts around the world proving that a quick trip to a sporting goods store might be better than billions of dollars of military equipment the need for the average citizen to start getting acquainted with the field of signant has never been more important signals intelligence is really a broad term for several other types of intelligence under the second umbrella we have comment or Communications intelligence that is information related to adversarial Communications that can be processed into valuable intelligence comment is usually what everyone thinks of when we talk about Sig wir Taps Stingray devices iom chatter or intercepted Communications chatter all of this is comment under the Sant umbrella we also have elent or electronic intelligence this is mostly referring to Sig that isn't specifically related to Communications things like radar signatures aircraft transponders GPS beacons things like that we also have various other inss that sort of overlap wit ommunications things like radar signatures aircraft transponders GPS beacons things like that we also have various other inss that sort of overlap with Sig at times masint or measurements and signatures intelligence has a lot of overlap with elint in many cases Fant or foreign instrumentation signals intelligence has a lot of overlap with comment and elint as well and telent or Telemetry intelligence has a lot in common with elent such as for drone tracking or collections pertaining to ballistic missiles as we can see however we want to slice it and with whatever new ins that they come up with to fill a resume bullet point we're really talking the same language between all of these subsets of the intelligence field and if you don't know what any of this stuff is don't worry we don't need to know the minute details to have a broad understanding that there are a lot of signals being flung through the air and being able to intercept some of these signals is very helpful in a tactical environment for the average citizen so let's take a look at an ultra basic signant collection setup that will add a lot of capabilities for most people as always remember that this is just one way of doin ok at an ultra basic signant collection setup that will add a lot of capabilities for most people as always remember that this is just one way of doing things that you can scale as needed so what do you need to get started first off you really need some kind of computer laptop or tablet here in the shop we really like old school Panasonic tough books because they are really easy to find all over the Internet and since the parts are very interchangeable it's pretty easy to cannibalize Parts as needed or even build one from the ground up from spare parts the other main benefit is ruggedness the laptops even long after their intended service life are seriously durable tools almost all of the tough books that we have here in the office have tens of thousands of hours on them when we got them and they are still going strong the Panasonic line of toughbooks also have some very unique features such as a heating element for your hard drive very important if you're going to be operating in cold weather Panasonic also has several lines of tough Tablet PCs which I personally have been working with for a while because they allow you to be vastly more manp portable I can put this tablet in a ch Tablet PCs which I personally have been working with for a while because they allow you to be vastly more manp portable I can put this tablet in a chest rig and literally have cant collection tools running as I am on the move with no input for me whatsoever the only other way I know of to get this same capability is to get a Windows Surface tablet at some point I will be integrating one of these into my own setup because the processor is vastly better than these older devices but for now I prefer a tablet that can run Windows right from a chest rig now I know what you were thinking why not just use a phone or an Android tablet well the answer is pretty simple processing power and the software you can run SDR software from a phone this is very popular it it can be done and it is a great way to get started but you will rapidly find out that a lot of the more advanced software is just too much for the processors on phones and much of the software that we're going to be using is available for Windows only or the only reliable way to get various software packages to work together is to use the dreaded Windows operating system I personally don't like it I would much rather use Linux for various software packages to work together is to use the dreaded Windows operating system I personally don't like it I would much rather use Linux for this stuff but in many cases is trying to get Linux to work with a lot of this software is not that easy raspberry pies are also another option that I wanted to mention and I really think they're a great idea for some setups so we will be examining these kinds of setups in the future because there's a lot more to it if you're trying to run a Raspberry Pi but for most people just getting started never having worked with any of this stuff before just getting an SDR and plugging it into their laptop will be a great way to start and speaking of the next bit of Hardware that we need is the SDR device itself software defined radio dongles are pretty easy to find online and are usually pretty cheap as of right now most common sdrs go for about $30 to $40 depending on inflation most sdrs are pretty similar but there are a few that are more popular than others the most common is the standard RTL SDR which can often times be purchased as a kit with an antenna to get you started the other common sdrs are from nuac specifically the Nestor smart SDR which can often times be purchased as a kit with an antenna to get you started the other common sdrs are from nuac specifically the Nestor smart T versions these are very handy for adding on sawbird filters and amplifiers without having to run external power so if you want to eventually start receiving satellite imagery one of these might be the SDR for you but again for an ultra basic setup any SDR will do finally we need an antenna your choice of antenna will be determined by what kinds of signals you want to receive for the setup today you will need two antennas one antenna that is specifically for 1090 mahz you can find these online sometimes in a two pack paired with a 978 MHz antenna the 78 MHz antenna is for receiving different kinds of signals which we will cover later but for now really you just need the 1090 MHz antenna for our purposes today technically speaking you could probably just get by with unscrewing the antenna from your handheld radio if you have one and just using that to see if all of this works together but if you're really wanting to get the best possible range you're going to need an antenna specifically tuned for 1090 MHz which we'll cover in a bit t t if you're really wanting to get the best possible range you're going to need an antenna specifically tuned for 1090 MHz which we'll cover in a bit the other antenna that you need is a simple V HF UHF whip antenna like I mentioned this could just be the one that you unscrewed from your handheld radio for just a second to test things out but that's basically what you need if you don't already have one of these you can get these pretty cheap as well I personally will be using a cattail antenna because that's what I already have routed through my gear but you can use a simple whip antenna to get you started if you wish just make sure that you are getting the right kind of SMA connector your SDR will probably have an SMA female connector so your antenna will need to have an SMA mail connector the side with the center pin this is important because some VHF UHF antennas have this reversed for some reason once you have all of your Hardware assembled your laptop your SDR and antenna we can start working on the software you need to make this stuff functional so let's jump to the desktop and we'll take it from there all right everyone so once we have our hardware and we've got our kit kind stuff functional so let's jump to the desktop and we'll take it from there all right everyone so once we have our hardware and we've got our kit kind of set up the way we want it now we can start focusing on the software and this is going to be very easy but we need a a few different software packages to make this work the very first software package that you need is sdrsharp which we can download right here uh now I did want to show you how to download this because this might be a little bit tricky uh if you click the wrong thing you're going to be kind of frustrated SDR sharp comes in a few different versions and what you need is this one sdrsharp with Community plugins this is going to make everything work a lot better you can download the very first one that you're going to see on the page but this is just the SDR sharp a few drivers here and there but no plugins SDR sharp with Community plugins comes with a whole Suite of plugins that will make your life easier as many people find out when they start playing around with SDR software uh none of this stuff is really easy to get to work together and a lot of times what I have found is it's easier for me to just download the commu are uh none of this stuff is really easy to get to work together and a lot of times what I have found is it's easier for me to just download the community plug-in version and delete the plugins that I don't need or just leave them in uh whereas if I download the regular version and try to manually put in plugins sometimes things don't work so well so always download the community plugins version at least that's what I do so just clicking download will allow you to download the file to wherever you want it to go the next piece of software you need is a program called RTL 1090 and as we can see by scrolling down the page here there are quite a few versions to choose from as well uh you could go with the standard version right here the very first one uh version one right there but uh most people I think will probably be using this one uh which includes the installer and maintenance utility basically it's a uh idiot proof way of setting this up so this is usually what I use because I'm kind of dumb with setting up this sort of software so this works out well for me one thing to note though is that if you do not use this you will need to configure this manually and you're going to need this works out well for me one thing to note though is that if you do not use this you will need to configure this manually and you're going to need to uh install uh some other software to make that work so if you wanted to go with the normal version you can uh you can just download it there but if you go with the normal version you're going to need this software here called zadig this is going to allow your SDR device to communicate with your computer basically it's just a driver installer for your RTL SDR most sdrs when you plug them into windows it's going to automatically recognize it and install the wrong driver so uh you need to manually install the right driver using this uh program here the reason I wanted to mention this here is because if you already have experience using SDR software chances are you've probably already done this and you don't need the regular uh installer process you can just download this version here but if you're just getting started you've never plugged your SDR in go with this version if you use this you're going to be using this with a lot of other uh software packages for SDR so usually it's just handy to have that as well and the last piece of s you're going to be using this with a lot of other uh software packages for SDR so usually it's just handy to have that as well and the last piece of software I wanted to mention is plane plotter now plane plotter I should mention right up front is a paid Tool uh you can use this for free for 21 days but after that you need to buy a license to continue using the software I'm not a huge fan of this for obvious reasons we don't really want to rely on um paid kinds of software that that might have the potential for going down or offline uh if we're trying to use this long term however this is really the best plane tracking software that I have found to use with adsb tracking uh platforms this will make a lot of sense when I show you what you can do with plane plotter and I might do a whole video dedicated to this software uh but I did want to mentioned that this is not the only software you can use there are other adsb kind of virtual radar packages out there that display that can display your adsb data however this one is commercial software uh and it has a lot of very unique features that are not quite available in the freeware area just yet so if you wanted to use something else you ware uh and it has a lot of very unique features that are not quite available in the freeware area just yet so if you wanted to use something else you can I just prefer this one because it has uh a couple of features that I'm personally willing to pay for but again it's up to you all right so once we've downloaded our software we should have three or four things depending on which version we went with uh we should have our Str Str sharp installer we should have the zip file from RTL 1090 with the IMU uh if you don't have the IMU part you're going to need this software the zodex and also our plane plotter so let's go ahead and start by installing sdrsharp it's a pretty simple installer we just go through the process uh we want to make sure to add the plugins and you can select which plugins you want uh I just choose them all because that's really the best way of doing things uh I'm going to install this directly to the C drive uh just because RTL software tends to work better directly from the root directory of your uh computer right so whichever Drive you're wanting to use you can install this stuff anywhere but usually it's best to leave it in your root directory just so you know o whichever Drive you're wanting to use you can install this stuff anywhere but usually it's best to leave it in your root directory just so you know so sdrsharp is going to be contacting the Internet it's also important to make sure that you have internet connection for this if you're trying to do this offline you're going to have to install sdrsharp using another connected computer to the internet and then dragging all these installation files over to the new computer that's offline if you like to do things kind of air gapped that way like like I do a lot of times you're going to need a thumb drive to transfer this stuff over because this installer package as we can see uses the internet to download all of the plugins that we need all right cool so sdrsharp is done installing we're going to go ahead and run it just all right so we're going to get a couple of pop-ups here for one it's going to open up a web browser uh in the background to take you to the community installer page and this is going to show you all of the plugins that it just installed that's not necessary it just kind of gets in the way you're also going to get a Windows alert if you're on the dreaded Windows platfo t just installed that's not necessary it just kind of gets in the way you're also going to get a Windows alert if you're on the dreaded Windows platform uh to allow it access uh to the internet we don't necessarily need that right now so we're just going to cancel it not not necessary once you have sdrsharp installed there's a couple of different things you can do you can go ahead and use the zadig application here to install the driver for your SDR your actual radio that you're going to be plugging into your computer or you can go ahead and go with the RTL 1090 setup so let's go ahead and do that uh it's kind of simple either way so we can go ahead and close out sdrsharp for now bring back up our ZIP file for RTL 1090 we can extract this ZIP file let's go ahead and extract it here makes it a little easier and there's there's our exe for that so RTL 1090 is our program they we're going to be using to intercept and process adsb Transmissions so let's go ahead and install it so now we have an installer which can install this program wherever we want to right it makes it a little bit easier than having to deal with command line kind of stuff to install RTL 1090 so we're going to go wi rever we want to right it makes it a little bit easier than having to deal with command line kind of stuff to install RTL 1090 so we're going to go with a new install and we can confirm the version that we want uh we want the version for Windows Vista 7 and 8 even though I'm on Windows 10 on this particular computer right now this will work just fine either way now we're going to choose installation directory and I and I want to put it somewhere uh different I want to put it directly into the C drive so so once we've got C drive selected we can click okay and we are downloading everything it's going through all of the processes to uh download and install a series of software uh including zadig which uh was downloaded before okay once we let RTL 1090 kind of do its thing we should have a couple of things pop up on our screen first one is Zig right here uh which if it did not pop up make sure that you uh have actually allowed administrator access for it you might have gotten a popup if it was on Windows uh I know I did a couple of times sometimes it doesn't but sometimes it does now I should note that sometimes this doesn't always happen sometimes this zodic menu won't pop up and som sometimes it doesn't but sometimes it does now I should note that sometimes this doesn't always happen sometimes this zodic menu won't pop up and sometimes it uh not even a notification will pop up either if that happens you might have to go through this whole process again and choose a different folder sometimes I found that I've installed this on about six different computers by now and I have found that sometimes uh installing RTL 1090 to the C drive doesn't doesn't work uh for some reason uh I don't know why it just doesn't uh so you might have to install it to like your desktop like just create a new folder on your desktop and install it there again I am not an IT guy by any means but a lot of this SDR software just kind of has a mind of its own sometimes so uh what you might have to do is install this to a different folder but but in any case once we're here we should be uh in the home stretch so we should have our zodic popping up here on the screen and we should also have and in the background uh the RTL IMU installer trying to give us instructions so move this off to the side a little bit so we can see both of these decently at the same time and we are ready to configure to give us instructions so move this off to the side a little bit so we can see both of these decently at the same time and we are ready to configure zodic so uh please insert your USB adsp dongle now and cancel and ignore all messages asking you to install a driver package so these are the instructions right uh this is trying to tell you to ignore what Windows is going to do which is install a driver for the USB device it's going to install the wrong driver so don't worry about canceling just let it do its thing and then we can work with it here later so we're all good to go I've plugged in my SDR to my computer and now we're ready to start configuring zodic here so let's click yes see it's it's kind of there it's trying to walk you through this uh zodic configuration because you can uh royally screw up something if you configure this wrong so let's continue through it all right so here here we go we've got the first picture showing us exactly what to do we go over here to Zig and we click options click list all devices now this is going to show all of the devices that are attached to our computer once we click yes and we are here at the device list we want to select the device th oing to show all of the devices that are attached to our computer once we click yes and we are here at the device list we want to select the device that is interface zero bulk in comma interface interface Z this is the one we want now as you can see I've already done this because I use sdrs on this computer kind of a lot so we already have the driver installed basically what zodic does is it detects what drivers are installed and then installs new ones uh depending on what you want Now the default configuration uh is pretty good to go as is but let's continue following the instructions here we want to make sure that we're using the right configuration path right user ID make sure it all matches up as we can see we want to make sure that everything is absolutely perfect uh we should click reinstall driver just to make sure that we're all good to go once we click reinstall driver there it's going to install the driver now the application is going to freeze for just a second so you're going to have to give it just a second or two to think uh because it will it will uh freeze your whole computer for just like one or two seconds I've noticed that it does that on every computer that I've k uh because it will it will uh freeze your whole computer for just like one or two seconds I've noticed that it does that on every computer that I've got so I don't know why but it does all right so there we go our driver's been installed successfully close we can make sure that we followed all the instructions you can close everything out now and we are are ready to go all right so we've installed RTL 1090 and we are good to go or so we thought so this is where you might want to start bashing your head against the keyboard because things get really complicated and kind of confusing really quickly this might be different for you uh but for me while making this video I have installed this uh software on five different laptops literally every single time getting the same exact error and that is that there's a missing dll so the so the more student of you might have noticed that once we went through the RTL 1090 IMU it failed to download a single dll file for whatever reason so if we were to go to our RTL 1090 folder which is right here this is the file that I installed all that too uh we can see that we've got RTL 1090 right here and if we CLI click the exe we're going to get this e this is the file that I installed all that too uh we can see that we've got RTL 1090 right here and if we CLI click the exe we're going to get this error here RTL sr. dll was not found reinstalling the program May fix this problem well what we need to do is find the dll file but fear not there are instructions thankfully this text file tells us exactly where we can download all of the missing dll files as we can see we're missing two dlls we're missing rtlsdr dll we have this one the msvcr100.dll that one's right there and we're missing the libusb -1.0 dll we're missing that one as well so we're missing two dll files that should have been installed but for whatever reason they weren't and I'm not sure why this error keeps happening but again like I mentioned I've tried this many times and it happens every time now here's the here's the unfortunate part you can take this uh URL and you can come to your handy dandy uh web browser put it in and you're going to get a 502 bad gateway or at least that's what I get every single time I've tried this and I don't know if this is due to the uh Russian sanctions uh due to the Ukrainian War because a lot of the RTL software is coming from Russ ied this and I don't know if this is due to the uh Russian sanctions uh due to the Ukrainian War because a lot of the RTL software is coming from Russian servers I don't know if that's related in any way but I've been getting this kind of a lot literally what I've been having to do this is kind of the workaround to your uh document here find that file name this seems to work really really well to kind of get around dead links a lot of times go back to Google drop it into the Google search bar and just Google it uh sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't but as we can see here it's from the same website osmocom dorg that was in our uh file here right so it's it's the same website and we click that and we have our ZIP file now I know this is really sketchy but this is kind of the way SDR software works a lot of times you got to go to really sketchy websites to get really obscure files to make your stuff work a lot of the a lot of the times and even though I'm following the instructions to the t uh it's not it doesn't work a lot of times so uh this is the workaround that I have found and once we download this file once once we click download we can just download that zip file very eas so uh this is the workaround that I have found and once we download this file once once we click download we can just download that zip file very easily get rid of all this come back to where we downloaded and there it is Rel with deinfo do Zips all right so once we extract that folder we should get this one right here which when we go inside it we have two folders here depending on what kind of operating system you're running on you can choose either 32-bit version or 64-bit version now I should mention that I am running a 64-bit operating system right now but I have to use a 32-bit version for whatever reason so if one version doesn't work try the other and see if that will work for you so once we're in the 32-bit version here in my case I'm going to select the dll files that I need so I'm going ahead going to go ahead and select rt. sr. dll and the other one the USB dll as well then using the analyst favorite trick contrl C to copy back to our RTL 1090 folder and contrl +v to paste so now we have all of the dll files to make this uh program work and if we click the exe thank goodness there we go it works so this is RTL 1090 working good to go if you click Start now our uh softw uh program work and if we click the exe thank goodness there we go it works so this is RTL 1090 working good to go if you click Start now our uh software is up and running and we are already decoding uh or starting to intercept and decode uh message traffic so if we go to our table here we can now see the call signs of the aircraft that are flying overhead right now now uh one thing I should mention is is that you can actually visualize this data with the latest version of RTL 1090 so let's go ahead and stop this for a moment and let's go back to our internet browser where we can go back to the RTL 1090 page now if you were to once you have this all installed and good to go you can go back and download this version the RTL 1090 scope all right so if we downloaded the radar version with the scope on it uh all we have to to do is extract that to its own folder here in our uh same folder we've been working from uh just to make it things a little bit cleaner uh so this is what you get when you extract all that folder you're going to get your uh dat files for uh displaying things like airports and navigational AIDS and stuff like that also your exe file so we're going to so we're going our uh dat files for uh displaying things like airports and navigational AIDS and stuff like that also your exe file so we're going to so we're going to go ahead and drag all of these over or controll C and crl +v them into the uh destination folder so we're going to go ahead and might as well replace x file doesn't doesn't really matter too much and then we can start the beta version I'm just showing you this version because now you can have kind of a radar setup if that's what you wanted now this is where you can stop if you wish and just kind of visualize uh the aircraft as they appear around you now I know I'm moving kind of fast through this uh the reason being is that this is not really necessary this is a beta feature for RTL 1090 and it's it's pretty cool honestly rather than just having you know your table or your your list of aircraft right uh you have them actually plotted on a map for you that's really what we're going for right uh but within RTL 1090 this is not a super super useful feature that's why we're using plain plotter because plain plotter talks to RTL 1090 so now that we've got an RTL 1090 all working and good to go let's actually start using that with plan p otter because plain plotter talks to RTL 1090 so now that we've got an RTL 1090 all working and good to go let's actually start using that with plan plotter one thing to remember before we proceed with installing plane plotter is to keep RTL 1090 running in the background this is very very important because we need information from RTL 1090 to feed into plane plotter during the installation process going back to our folder that we've been working out of it's very easy to install plane plotter we're just going to double click the exe file uh you're going to get another Windows trying to protect you from something that it doesn't need to protect you from run anyway now the first popup you're going to get is uh trying to tell you that the time for this particular computer is not as accurate for a lot of SDR software you actually need uh time management software to actually make sure that your PC clock is hyper accurate uh for multilateration this is absolutely needed uh but we'll talk about that much much further down the line uh for now we don't we don't need to worry about this for adsb kinds of stuff so we'll just go ahead and go through the setup wizard so I'm going to go ahead an we don't we don't need to worry about this for adsb kinds of stuff so we'll just go ahead and go through the setup wizard so I'm going to go ahead and install plane plotter instead of to the fold folder I've been working out of I'm going to install it to my C drive just because it tends to work better from there but again if it's buggy you can move it to a different folder uh to wherever it needs to go so I'm going to go ahead and install all this stuff clicking through it no problem there go through all this stuff install it cool now we're done with the installation and we can run plane plotter all right so we get a popup saying uh we've got our we're on day one of our 21-day free trial do you wish to register PL PL to keep using it I'm not going to register it right now but again I would kind of recommend it honestly in the long run because I find that plan plot has some features that I use uh more than anything else so again you can register it later if you wish uh but for now we're just going to go with the free version and we're going to get another popup that talks about a Google map don't worry about that for now uh we're going to be using the global base map so we're going going to get another popup that talks about a Google map don't worry about that for now uh we're going to be using the global base map so we're going to click okay and we're it's going to give us the configuration menu for our SDR do you want to configure plan plot to for your receiver now yes have you prepared and calibrated a local chart no uh it's going to tell us to choose globe. jpeg in the next dialogue this is just to get us started you can add in a aeronautical charts uh later on but we're just going to use the global uh one for now so here's our globe. jpeg this is going to be our background for our chart and there we go you can see it's kind of loaded in the background there okay now that we have have our background map uh our chart ready to go we're just using a simple Globe default chart once we have that good to go now we can start pulling in those feeds and that's why it was so important for us to leave RTL 1090 running in the background so if we have RTL 1090 running in the background we should still see that we're receiving packets uh as aircraft are flying by overhead that's all good to go um we can minimize this or just kind of move it out of the way and start go eiving packets uh as aircraft are flying by overhead that's all good to go um we can minimize this or just kind of move it out of the way and start going through the pl plotter process if you forget it's okay we can we can restart uh this menu let's just say for instance we forgot and uh we we exited the kind of setup wizard here that's perfectly fine we can go back to help uh Setup Wizard and run through the configuration uh again just to you know choosing our globe again and now we're back here to the same menu this is very helpful in case you you know get kind of tunnel visioned and start clicking a bunch of stuff because we're about to start clicking a lot of dialogue boxes that pop up and the first one is plan plotter wanting us to connect to some data so the first question it asks us is do you have a receiver connected to your PC whose output you want plain plotter to process we click yes the next question is do you have an adsb mode as receiver and then it starts listing all of these different receivers we're going to also click yes to this one now we're going to click no a bunch of times because we don't have uh it's trying to find out exactly what receiver we have so we do k yes to this one now we're going to click no a bunch of times because we don't have uh it's trying to find out exactly what receiver we have so we don't have the kinetic sbs1 uh we don't have the airnav radar box plane Gadget we're going to click no until we get to uh it's just after AVR receiver I think yes until we get to RTL dongle do you have an RTL dongle connected we're going to answer yes to that one and the next question then is is the dongle connected using RTL 1090 utility again the answer is yes check the IP address and port for 10 RTL 1090 and then press okay so so we bring up our RTL 1090 and we see what port we're on in this case we're on Port 31001 and we can leave that running press okay and type in see it's it's going to default to the wrong Port so we want 3101 then click okay all right so start RTL 1090 processing the signals from the dongle and press okay all right cool we're already doing that plane plotter is now proc processing your chosen input next time you run remember to click the green button to start processing Okay cool so now plane plotter is working okay now that we've got RTL 1090 running in the background and plane plotter is all installed and goo essing Okay cool so now plane plotter is working okay now that we've got RTL 1090 running in the background and plane plotter is all installed and good to go and everything's working together uh we need to do a couple of things to get plane plotter to work the very first thing that we need to do is update our home location so uh for me this default spot right here in Arkansas is what populated as the home location that I obviously don't live in Arkansas so um what we're going to do is go to options home location home location setup and you can put in your GPS coordinates here it doesn't need to be super precise but you do need to be kind of close to your actual location wherever you're going to be this is super super super important because otherwise your aircraft are not going to be plotting in the right spot on your map a lot of times once you get that done you can press your green button up here and aircraft should start appearing on your map as they are being uh intercepted by your SDR being processed by RTL 1090 and running from plane plotter now let's talk about some of the features that you can set up to actually use this in more of a tactical environment if you wanted to on plane plotter now let's talk about some of the features that you can set up to actually use this in more of a tactical environment if you wanted to one of the things that makes this software package really cool is the ability to set alerts so let's just zoom in here to Arkansas and I'll refresh my map right here really quickly get a nice crisp image and let's go ahead and add in some alerts so I'll go to options alert we'll make a let's make an alert Zone here I'll add one and I will draw a nice little circle is around my site go back to options alert alert Zone and I will save that what you can do is set up these alert zones so that any aircraft that flies inside this circle you get an actual Al alert tone you get a notification uh you can set this to be a custom notification if you want that's very handy for some people but for me uh I think that this is probably a little bit more of a simplistic thing if you live in an area with a lot of traffic like I do there are aircraft everywhere filling the skies basically around my location what you might want to do is instead of setting up zones like this which you can you can play with on your own uh what you might want to do is instead what you might want to do is instead of setting up zones like this which you can you can play with on your own uh what you might want to do is instead of using these alerts here go down to conditional expressions and add an alert conditional expression now what this will do is it allows you to set very specific parameters that will trigger an alert so for example here in this example if the aircraft's range is less than 20 nautical miles and the altitude is less than 10,000 ft and the flight number is equal to whatever number you want it to be it will trigger an alert so let's go ahead and get kind of a rudimentary one going here let's say let's use a range again let say range double click it to add it to the thing or you could just type it out if you understand the the logic here is let's say range is less than 10 let's see and the let's go back and say altitude altitude is less than 10,000 ft that will be our notification so if I were to save this which I can do right now let me bring it back up there to talk about it a little bit this will send me an alert if an aircraft appears with in 10 miles of my location meaning that if they are less than 10 miles away from me and their al his will send me an alert if an aircraft appears with in 10 miles of my location meaning that if they are less than 10 miles away from me and their altitude is less than 10,000 ft I can also add in a few other parameters such as different call signs and tail numbers and things like that if I want it to uh but for the most part this will probably get you going really uh really good so uh this is a very simple conditional expression so that you can basically have this running either on a Raspberry Pi or on a small tablet and you can be walking around doing your thing and when your antenna picks up an aircraft that is less than 10 miles away from you and less than 10,000 ft in altitude it will send you an audible alert very very handy because in most cases I don't really care about aircraft that are you know passenger aircraft that are flying at you know 35,000 ft not really interesting to me however if there is an aircraft that's you know kind of close to me and it's also flying Bel beneath a standard you know air Corridor that's interesting to me and I might want to know about that so using conditional Expressions you can be a lot more tactically capable in understanding what is goi sting to me and I might want to know about that so using conditional Expressions you can be a lot more tactically capable in understanding what is going on around you and also be jogged to understand when you uh get a aircraft in your specific area and you can also set these conditional expressions for other things as well if you were to bring up the conditional Expressions menu you can decide what aircraft even make it onto the map if you don't want to track every single aircraft that you you can pick up with your antenna uh you can set conditional Expressions to dictate which aircraft even show up on your map in the first place that might be handy if you like live near an airport and you don't really care about 90% of the traffic that's flying around all the time uh but you are concerned about some of those aircraft you can set conditional Expressions to be very specific you can also set conditional Expressions to decide what gets displayed uh in logs and lists and things like that so very handy for kind of sorting down especially in hight trffic areas what kinds of aircraft you want to see one thing that might be also very handy for you if you're using alerts is to set what para n hight trffic areas what kinds of aircraft you want to see one thing that might be also very handy for you if you're using alerts is to set what parameters or what data gets displayed with an alert so for instance let's go here to options alert alert Fields now this is the information that will be displayed on your screen when an alert goes off this is the default configuration here and I can change it however I want right so I'm not really so concerned about the hex code I do want flight number and registration though because the flight number will tell me what airline uh the aircraft is working with and registration if the aircraft is not part of a uh form formalized you know Airline commercial airline it it will tell me uh what the registration of that aircraft is uh very handy uh you can put the time tag as to when you receive the alert as well the speed all kinds of stuff alert Origins very handy to tell you what kind of alert it was that that triggered uh you being notified about this but one thing that might be very handy to have is adding in altitude so it actually displays the altitude of the aircraft and also range it will tell you how far away that aircraft is so you kn ave is adding in altitude so it actually displays the altitude of the aircraft and also range it will tell you how far away that aircraft is so you know you get a notification sound you know from your speaker or in your earbud you can look down at your tablet screen and see the notification which tells you everything you need to know what flight number it is uh if it's not a commercial aircraft what registration it is uh how far away it is from you and its altitude very very handy information to have at a quick glance something else very handy to display on the screen if you wanted to are range rings so let's go ahead and zoom in a little bit here uh to our current home location refresh our map to make it nice and crisp again and let's go to the map settings here now this chart options uh menu looks really busy and it kind of is but we're just going to go down here to the bottom where it says range Rings we can put them around our home location and let's put them out let's say let's say 50 miles and click okay there we go now I just drew uh range Rings 50 Mi out at one ring every uh 10 miles obviously all the way out from our location this is what most people will probably use beca rew uh range Rings 50 Mi out at one ring every uh 10 miles obviously all the way out from our location this is what most people will probably use because usually if you're talking about a a man portable uh adsb receiver setup you're not going to be able to pick up aircraft more than say 50 miles out or so uh in any direction uh if you're living in an area where you can get a very high antenna up or you're in uh some some high elevation areas you can certainly get much more you could probably cover a significant portion of the United States with just your small receiver but in any case this will work quite well to show you at a quick glance how far out a specific aircraft is something else that might be very very handy for you to add in is your polar diagram now this essentially shows you how far out your receiver is picking up aircraft basically in real time so it shows you which aircraft you're able to receive now to set this up let's go ahead and make things less confusing by let's get rid of that alert and clear that out so now we've just got our range rings and our home location to set up our polar diagram it's very very simple just go to view it's not under options it's under ve just got our range rings and our home location to set up our polar diagram it's very very simple just go to view it's not under options it's under view polar diagram and then click plot max range now what that will do if you have aircraft being plotted on your map you will start to see a shape being drawn and if you hold still for long enough and you know don't move your antenna around a little bit it will start to calculate based on the aircraft that that it can hear how far out you can actually receive aircraft now normally when I you know turn on the uh polar diagram what I will do is leave the antenna in place and leave this entire setup running for about 24 hours or so to allow air enough aircraft to fly by that it plots exactly what the ranges are so so after a while you should have something that looks kind of like this this kind of like explosion style graphic and this shows you how far out your receiver can pick up aircraft and this will update in real time as you pick up more and more aircraft and as you move to positions where you might not have such a good view so you can literally walk all all day up and down mountains and at a moment's notice know exactly how far o where you might not have such a good view so you can literally walk all all day up and down mountains and at a moment's notice know exactly how far out you can hear aircraft if they were in the air that's very very handy because a lot of times in the radio world we don't actually know how far out we're transmitting or receiving right we might be behind valleys or things like that and we don't necessarily have the time to conduct line of sight analysis for every step that we take along a trail this software being a very capable professional grade software will do it automatically for you in real time so it will allow you to understand exactly how far out you can hear aircraft at a moment's notice that is very very handy to me and this feature alone makes it worth it uh over some of the other freear applications out there all right ladies and gentlemen so we are in the home stretch now we are almost done with our basic Sig setup for now to wrap things up on the software side of things let's go back and add in a simple plugin to sdrsharp and configure it so that it can work as a scanner this is a lot easier than configuring some of that Aviation tracking software all we have to do is p and configure it so that it can work as a scanner this is a lot easier than configuring some of that Aviation tracking software all we have to do is bring up our SDR sharp uh menu here and as we can see this is just kind of the the base menu that you're going to get when you launch sdrsharp all we have to do again if we have loaded in the community plugins version of the software all we have to do is go to menu and search for a program or a plugin called frequency scanner there we go we've located frequency scanner in our plugins list all we have to do is click it and it will open up the window and kind of launch it for you there are far better scanning applications for sdrs uh this is arguably one of the simplest and easiest to use though so it will kind of get you in the understanding mode of how this stuff really works so all we're going to do is go over here to edit scan ranges click that and it will open up the menu for us here so let me go ahead and delete this one so I can show you what you'll see when you open it up for the first time and really all we're going to do is start adding in scan ranges remember this is a very basic very basic setup for uh scanning with an SDR first time and really all we're going to do is start adding in scan ranges remember this is a very basic very basic setup for uh scanning with an SDR if you don't have a a traditional handheld scanner or something like that so what we're going to do is just do the ultra basic stuff and program in a couple of different uh frequency ranges and the first one we'll do is just the 2 meter ham band so we'll start at uh we have to put this in in hertz as you can see here so just how it is in s strr sharp if you kind of forget how to convert megahertz to Hertz it's very simple so 144 there we go and we'll do the back end of the VHF uh to 2 met hand band there we go and we'll keep the detector the same that's the narrow band FM and since we're doing narrow band kind of stuff I want to keep this a little bit more narrow than it needs to be honestly and we'll keep the bandwidth at 5,000 along with our standard uh steps at 5,000 uh for most of your handbands I for VHF and UHF for 2 MERS and 70 CM I'm pretty sure the step size is basically 5,000 Hertz or 5 mehz on both of those bands uh the bandwidth can vary this is much more narrow than it needs to be uh but I want to make sure that I'm cover ertz or 5 mehz on both of those bands uh the bandwidth can vary this is much more narrow than it needs to be uh but I want to make sure that I'm covering everything that that might uh be slightly off frequency remember a lot of the people that I'm going to try to be listening to are going to be probably uh shifting their frequency quite a bit or they're going to be wandering off of the frequency that they need to be because they're using um radios that are not quite up to FCC standard so um there we go we've got the 2 m hand band in and let's let's go ahead and put in 70 CM as well this is going to take care of most of our uh VHF and UHF Communications in the United States again the bandwidth here and the step size that I'm going with is a little bit more narrow than than it needs to be but that's okay uh basically what I'm doing here is setting up this scanner to allow me to scan both the VHF and UHF handbands uh for any kind of communications that people are going to be transmitting so roughly this this simple scanner and these simple uh scan ranges I've set up here are going to be able to detect the vast majority of communications that are going to be out there so there we go we le uh scan ranges I've set up here are going to be able to detect the vast majority of communications that are going to be out there so there we go we've set up our scan ranges we can click okay we can add as many as we want but now we have them over here in our little menu and if we were to go ahead and click play we would see the scanner begin and scan away so let's recap and take a look at this basic setup in its entirety on the hardware side we have some basic gear we have have our laptop or in this case a tablet running on the Windows operating system that also has a USB port plugged into that USB port we have a generic SDR dongle which also has an antenna attached that is the proper antenna for what kinds of signals we want to listen to Chances Are you will need multiple antennas for different frequency ranges in this case we're using an antenna that is resonant on 1090 MHz and we're also using a flexible whip antenna that works on VHF and UHF frequencies and we can swap between the two antennas as the mission requires if we want to listen to aircraft we leave the 1090 MHz antenna installed if we want to start scanning VHF or UHF frequencies we will switch to a VHF or UHF ant t to listen to aircraft we leave the 1090 MHz antenna installed if we want to start scanning VHF or UHF frequencies we will switch to a VHF or UHF antenna on the software side of things we are running SDR sharp because it's a very basic software package to get started with and it has a lot of plugins that we can take advantage of such as simple scanning logging and recording plugins we are also running RTL 1090 in conjunction with plane plotter to not only visualize aircraft overhead but also track and log them and even send us audible alerts when specific aircraft fly overhead or specific parameters are met with this setup we can eliminate a massive problem with Sig which is not knowing how far out you can receive aircraft if you are hiking along a trail and slowly find yourself coming into restricting terrain you might look down at your tablet and not see any aircraft on the map so you might think oh there just aren't any aircraft flying around overhead but in reality it's just a Terrain masking your ability to receive their adsb Transmissions with plane plotter you will know at a glance exactly how far out you can receive aircraft and this will update in real time as you travel ansmissions with plane plotter you will know at a glance exactly how far out you can receive aircraft and this will update in real time as you travel so you will always know whether or not the lack of aircraft is really due to a lack of aircraft or because you can't pick them up due to terrain and finally we can add in some software that I have left off until now which is Artemis by Aries Valley emis is a simple bit of of software but it adds a lot of capability in short it allows you to identify what kinds of signals you can pick up on your SDR a lot of times we're not going to pick up just voice transmissions in most cases we're also going to pick up strange signals that we might not know what they are emis is a digital library for hundreds of signals which you can use to audibly compare and contrast whatever signal you detected you can also see what the signal looks like on a waterfall simply put Artemis will help you figure out if that signal you heard is an encrypted handheld radio transmission or a qpsk modem used by the Iranian Navy and since this program pulls info from sigid wiki.com this will continuously be updated as more and more people contribute to this project and i Navy and since this program pulls info from sigid wiki.com this will continuously be updated as more and more people contribute to this project and in the future I would hope for a Plugin or something that will allow us to automatically identify signals and get a notification without the end user having to do anything it would be pretty handy to get a notification like this warning Fire Control radar detected bear 315 we're really close to being able to set this up and I would expect that several people are already working on this feature or something like it stepping away from sdrs for a moment if we want we can also bring along a handheld scanner which will dramatically increase the convenience factor and also retain capabilities when your SDR is occupied remember sdrs often times can only be used for one thing at one time so if you are scanning the band with SDR sharp you can't track aircraft at the same time time it's one or the other if you wanted to you could have a base station set up with a laptop that has multiple USB ports for multiple sdrs but this is what I would consider pretty Advanced and it's not that easy to do but it can be done if you so choose I myself find it' for multiple sdrs but this is what I would consider pretty Advanced and it's not that easy to do but it can be done if you so choose I myself find it's easier to just run one SDR plugged into one tablet doing one thing usually I'll leave RTL 1090 and plane plotter running logging all of the aircraft that fly overhead and to monitor radio traffic I'll just run an independent scanner in my area I need some pretty Advanced p25 decoding capabilities and since decoding p25 Public Service traffic is pretty taxing on an SDR I tend to just listen to local traffic with a dedicated scanner that does it all at once but just getting started with an ultra basic setup using scanner utilities on SDR sharp is pretty effective and as you get into the SDR game a bit more you can get more capable SDR receivers which can view basically the entire Spectrum at once but that's a bit Advanced and something we'll talk about in future content there's an old phrase that goes he who builds a house according to Every Man's advice will have a crooked house in the communications in Sig World a similar idea exists that is that he who builds his radio network according to Every Man's advice will be ineffective at communications in Sig World a similar idea exists that is that he who builds his radio network according to Every Man's advice will be ineffective at communicating and go broke buying unnecessary gear in the process so please remember that there are infinite ways of doing things in most cases so many ways of getting to the same goal that it's overwhelming and frustrating within the world of communications or Sig or anything along these lines it's probably a good idea to start with your end goals what capabilities you need and work backwards from there now if you are using this setup that we've talked about today someone can ask you hey what Sig capabilities do you have and you can reply I can intercept adsb transmissions and track aircraft and I can also scan whatever frequencies and identify whatever signals you need me to that's a much better answer than replying what is signant finally start small being able to intercept simple radio traffic around you and being able to track aircraft overhead is a huge Advantage if you previously had nothing at all you're going from nothing to something and this is a good base to work from when we start talking about more advanced stuff but for had nothing at all you're going from nothing to something and this is a good base to work from when we start talking about more advanced stuff but for now this tiny Peak into the world of Sig will get us started and more importantly get motivated to go from zero Sig capabilities to something useful thankfully SDR devices are pretty cheap and plentiful even in times of shortage and most of the software is free or have free versions of it so you aren't risking much by trying this stuff out so try it out and see what works for you if nothing else these capabilities will allow you to more easily fight in the shade