Comment by ryandrake
2 hours ago
I’ve got one SDR reading air and VHF, one reading 1090 ADS-B, one on 433MHz reading weather stations, temp sensors, tire pressure modules, lots of stuff; finally a fourth one picking up local 70cm and 2m traffic. Oh and a GPS puck providing a stratum 1 time server. Lots of stuff to do and lots of exploring around your local bands.
Claude is surprisingly good at mapping out complex multi-repeater trunking systems, and identifying DMR vs P25 vs NXDN signals, so even if you know nothing about digital radio, you can be listening in minutes.
How do you wire up Claude to listen in to your SDR?
I didn’t think it would work either, but prompts like “Analyze the signal at 458.25MHz and determine the digital encoding” were all it took. Claude knew how to use the suite of rtl-sdr command line tools, and wrote throwaway Python scripts to analyze the captured data looking for modulation schemes, codec rates, estimating channel bandwidth, and so on. It was actually pretty impressive.
With some help, it downloaded the fcc licensor databases and ingested them into a SQLite database, which allowed it to identify voice frequencies that correspond to an identified control channel.
You can then use tools like dsd-fme to decode and playback digital voice channels and scan entire trunk systems. I’ve been having a blast lately and learning a lot.