RTL-SDR book review

I have read ”The hobbyist’s guide to the RTL-SDR really cheap software defined radio” by Carl Laufer. It is a old e-book, downloadable e.g. from amazon

To experiment with software defined radio, I bought an rtl1832U, and I saw the book as a primer on how they were thinking SDR. For that purpose, I think it hit a sweet spot, where people unfamiliar with SDR can get introduced and some of the words for further reading.

As many of these book do, it includes a lot of installation instructions for various platform. I get that it makes the book bigger, but it is redundant, and becomes obsolete in no time. And, if you are playing with SDR like this, you are probable capable of reading the official installation guide for a given software.

It includes a lot of examples of use cases. This is useful, since getting the ideas is half the game. I’m not that much into ships, planes or satelites, but other topics I will into could be passive radar systems, APRS (automatic position reporting system), radio direction finding and all things mobile phone related.

Worth mentioning is that, even though, the book is old, they have a blog with all sorts of RTL-SDR related examples. Perhaps kerberossdr is something to look into also.

Also, besides the SDR part of the dongle, it can also just be used for DAB or DVB-T - which should just work like other receivers.

I like that it include an entire chapter on antennas. This is one of those chapters where you get introduced to a lot of concepts, so you have an idea of what to google, when you start designing your application.

Hopefully, we will have more blog posts about SDR. It is a cool topic with lots of applications. My initial thought was to make a detector for finding the gap in the wire for the robotic lawn mower.

All in all the book is mostly about telling the world about the virtues of RTL-SDR, and for that I find it successful.