We've recently had several submissions about the release of a new program called NRSC5 Studio, a new native open source Windows GUI for the nrsc5 HD Radio decoder. We note that in the past, we've posted about nrsc5 and the NRSC5-DUI interface. nrsc5 is an open source decoder for the proprietary HD Radio digital audio […]

Thank you to the team at Feedline Labs for writing in and sharing news of their new project called AirPulse Desktop. AirPulse is a Windows desktop application that turns an RTL-SDR into a small repeater activity monitoring station. The software continuously scans the output frequencies of nearby amateur radio repeaters, detects when a signal exceeds […]

Over on the Saveitforparts YouTube channel, Gabe has documented how he accidentally discovered signals coming from the GPS-satellite-based US nuclear detection system. While scanning the GPS L3 frequency around 1381 MHz with his RTL-SDR, Discovery Dish, 1420 MHz Hydrogen line Discovery Dish feed, and Discovery Drive, Gabe caught short intermittent data bursts instead of the […]

Recently, Cameron Paczek has created a new project called SkyLight, where art meets technical implementation by displaying a live view of aircraft flying overhead on your ceiling. SkyLight consists of a projector, Raspberry Pi 5, RTL-SDR dongle, and some custom software. The Raspberry Pi 5 and RTL-SDR receive live ADS-B data from local aircraft, and […]

Thank you to Christian from ebcTech for writing in and sharing with us that their Dump1090 app for Android has recently been completely redesigned. We first posted about this app back in 2021. The developer notes that the V2 redesign is faster and has an improved UI. The app allowes users to use an RTL-SDR […]

Interoperable Train Control (ITC) is a radio protocol operating at 220 MHz that is used by most railroads in the United States. ITC is a safety system designed to help prevent train-to-train collisions, derailments caused by excessive speed, incursions into work zones where maintenance crews are present, and movement of a train through a switch […]

Thank you to Arved (DK5AV/M0KDS) for writing in and sharing with us some exciting news. Arved has just announced his USBDriverKit extension for RTL-SDRs over on X and released it as open-source code on GitHub. This is an unofficial port of librtlsdr, created using USBDriverKit instead of libusb, which is not available on iOS. This now allows RTL-SDRs to […]

Thank you to Eric Inloes for submitting to the blog his new tool called "iq_tool". This is a tool designed to "provide an easy, fast, and lightweight command-line utility for converting I/Q data from files or SDRs to a specific sample rate and format, and then either piping it to other programs or writing it […]

Thank you to Paul Maine, who has submitted to us two new SatDump tutorials that he has uploaded to his YouTube channel. These two tutorials follow on from his previous tutorials that we posted a month ago. His SatDump V2.x Part 5 video demonstrates Recording and Processing. Paul shows his hardware setup and then shows […]

Thank you to Mike (DL2MF) for writing in about the release of OpenWXSDR, a new open-source Python framework that turns one or more RTL-SDR dongles or Airspy SDRs into a fully automated radiosonde ground station running on a Raspberry Pi 4/5 or Linux x86 machine. If you are unaware, a radiosonde is a lightweight instrument […]

Thank you to George (gbozo), who has just released no-sdr (named from No(de)-sdr), a new open source multi-user WebSDR for the RTL-SDR written in Go and node JS. A WebSDR allows users to run an SDR remotely and access it over a local or internet network connection. This is useful for bringing an SDR closer […]

Thank you to qewer33, who has written in to share the release of his new Terminal User Interface (TUI) program for RTL-SDR and HackRF SDRs. The program is called sdrrat, and it provides a complete TUI with FFT graph, waterfall spectrogram, VFO, and basic WBFM/NBFM/AM demodulation. qewer33 notes that the software is built with Rust, […]

Thank you to Gary Schneider from workingwithwildlife.org for writing in and submitting news about the release of his Android App called "SDR Direction Finder (RTL-SDR)" which currently costs US$9.99. Gary is a wildlife conservationist who has been using RTL-SDRs and his Android app to track animal beacons in the wild. Gary writes his story best: […]

Thank you to James Mainwaring of Knowle Consultants for submitting news about the release of an iOS port of his previously Android-only "Spectrum SDR" app for RTL-SDR. Knowle Consultants have previously released a range of RTL-SDR Android apps for FM, Airband, Ham FM and ADS-B reception. James writes: As most people will be aware, it is not currently possible […]

Back in June 2025, we posted about SDR ProTrack, a radio direction-finding app that uses an RTL-SDR and directional antenna to determine a bearing towards a transmitter. Alex has recently written in to note some major updates to the app. He notes that the app has been redesigned for user-friendliness and to be as relevant […]

Thank you to Matt Cheramie, who wrote in to let us know about his new software called GopherTrunk, a new RTL-SDR compatible radio scanner that follows digital trunked-radio voice calls and decodes them into audio. Gopher Trunk runs on a pool of RTL-SDR dongles and ships as a single ~10 MB static binary for Linux, […]

Over on Kickstarter, Lambda58 LLC has released a campaign for their PicoADSB product, a self-contained 1090 MHz ADS-B receiver that replaces a typical SDR plus Raspberry Pi feeder setup with a single SD-card-sized PCB measuring 25mm x 15mm and weighing only 3 grams. At the time of this post, the campaign has reached around $12,700 […]

The RTL-SDR Blog V4 has been a very popular product that we released back in August 2023. Back then, it was released as a 'limited edition' product because the Blog V4 relied on the Rafael R828D chip, which Rafael Micro no longer produces. We did have access to a large stockpile that we calculated could […]

Over on YouTube, Gabe from the saveitforparts channel has uploaded a video where he tests out his Discovery Drive and Discovery Dish with L-Band feed for creating sky heatmaps of L-band satellites. If you were unaware, Discovery Drive is our sister company KrakenRF's most recent successful crowdfunding campaign, which was successfully funded a couple of […]

The following is a guest post submitted by Matt Larson. The post explains how Matt Larson set up an automated atmospheric wind-sensing station using only locally obtained ADS-B data from an RTL-SDR. Matt's code is available on GitHub. Listening to the Jet Stream - 100 Days of Wind Sensing with Stock RTL-SDR Hardware By Matt […]

The Taipei Times has reported that a 23-year-old university student in Taiwan has been arrested after using a software-defined radio and hand held radio to hack into Taiwan High Speed Rail Corporation's (THSRC) internal radio communications and halt four trains mid-service. Chinese-language coverage from UDN and Newtalk fills in some details omitted in the English Taipei Times […]

Thank you to Paul Maine, who has submitted a new SatDump tutorial to us that he has uploaded to his YouTube channel. The new tutorial is the fourth in a series focused on SatDump V2.x. In an earlier post, we showed Paul's three previous tutorials. His SatDump V2.x Part 4 video provides an introduction to […]

Thanks to weather satellite enthusiast 'Heja Ali' who wrote in to share some welcome news. On February 12, 2026, Roscosmos successfully launched Elektro-L No.5 aboard a Proton-M rocket from Baikonur Cosmodrome, the fifth in the Elektro-L series of Russian geostationary weather satellites (following No.1 in 2011, No.2 in 2015, No.3 in 2019 and No.4 in […]

Over on GitHub, programmer blantonl has released p25-survey, a Python tool that scans a frequency range with an RTL-SDR, Airspy or HackRF and identifies any P25 control channels present. For each one found, it logs the WACN, System ID, NAC, RFSS ID and Site ID, the full IDEN_UP band plan, neighbor sites with resolved frequencies, […]

Over on GitHub, John Stockdale has released ADS-B Scope – T-Display-P4, a portable open source 1090 MHz ADS-B firmware for the LILYGO T-Display-P4, which is a smartphone-shaped handheld microcontroller with a 4" touchscreen, GPS, SD card, SX1262 LoRa, and a USB 2.0 host port, built around the dual-core 360 MHz RISC-V ESP32-P4. The most interesting […]

Over on Medium, Jugy depin has shared a useful troubleshooting write-up describing how they recovered a frozen RTL-SDR on a remote Raspberry Pi station located 700 km away, with no physical access available. The dongle had stopped responding with usb_claim_interface error -6 and Failed to open rtlsdr device #0 errors, while still showing up in […]

Over on YouTube Manuel from the 'Build a Cubesat' channel has uploaded a video testing a prototype version of our Discovery Drive antenna rotator. If you are unaware, Discovery Drive is our new antenna rotator product for applications like satellite tracking and general antenna positioning that is currently being crowd-funded over on Crowd Supply. There […]

Thank you to Christian Ebner from ebcTech, who has submitted news about his newly released Android app RTL-SDR 433, which lets you run the rtl_433 decoder directly on your phone using an RTL-SDR dongle connected via a USB OTG cable. The app bundles rtl_433 as a native Android library and supports all 258 device protocols […]

AIS (Automatic Identification System) is the VHF protocol on ~162 MHz that ships use to broadcast position, speed, heading and identity, and it's long been a popular decoding target for RTL-SDR owners. Feeder networks like MarineTraffic and AISHub have relied on volunteer receivers for years, but a newer project called MastChain applies the DePIN (Decentralized […]

Over on GitHub, Martin (mgrone) recently released stream1090, a new open source C++ Mode-S demodulator that takes a fundamentally different approach to finding aircraft messages. Rather than searching for the traditional preamble pulse sequence as dump1090 and readsb do, stream1090 continuously maintains shift registers and identifies valid messages based on their CRC checksum. In busy airspace…