hello and welcome to another episode of theibookguy. it is my job to show you cool things that you can do with your mac. and i havesomething really unusual and interesting for you today. i want to show you this littleguy. its a usb dongle that you can buy on ebay for about $15. comes with this littleantenna here. so, the purpose of these is for watching television. but these aren'tdesigned for american television standards,
Android TV raspberry pi 3, they're actually designed for european, ibelieve. but we're not going to use them for watching television, there is something elseyou can do with them, which i'm going to show you. ok, so just plug in this thing and goonline and download a program called gqrx. this is a software defined radio. you cantype in any frequency you want to listen to.
lets try listening to fm radio. a popularstation in the dallas area is mix 102.9. it comes in quite clearly. "exclusively at kroger.1 0 2 9 now one station" but what about some less obvious things. how about c.b. radioon channel 19? i can tune my scanner to 27.185 mhz and hit the transmit button. "testing,testing, 1, 2, 3." what about using a gmrs or amateur radio? i can key in a frequencyon my radio and put in the same frequency on my scanner and talk away. "this is a testof ibookguy broadcasting system. thank you for listening." what if i want to listen tonoaa weather radio? "highs in the mid 70's. south winds 5 to 10 miles an hour becomingnorth" i can also listen to the arlington police dispatch. "ok fd squad 2 just droveoff. 10-4" here's one you might not have thought
of. what does my chevy keyfob sound like?what about my nissan keyfob? notice that it transmits on two frequencies at the same time.here are some other thoughts of things to listen to. fire department, airplanes, marinevhf, and business radios. so yeah, there are an endless number of things that you can listento with this. one of the things that you'll find out when you start just kind of randomlylooking through the radio spectrum is you will be amazed at how many frequencies areactually in use all of the time, all around you. i mean, you can't see it, you can't hearit, you don't even typically have devices that can receive it, but the airwaves areactually quite crowded. most of the signals are digital signals so you're just going tohear weird noises and stuff. um, but there's
a lot of analog stuff out there you can listento. so anyway, i hope that you might find some kind of useful entertainment out of thisdevice. i mean it's $15, about the cost of getting a pizza. so it's not a whole lot tospend. i would point out when you go to buy one of these, just look on ebay and type insomething like s.d.r. for software defined radio. you're most likely going to find someof these things already being advertised for that purpose so you'll know you're gettingthe right one. and of course, it goes without saying, these things work on windows computersas well. in fact, it was hard for me to find some software to show you that works on themacs. so if you have a windows machine you
actually have even a wider selection of differentsoftware that you can use for your software
defined radio. and if you liked the episode,please go ahead and click like, that's how i know i'm doing a good job. and considersubscribing if you haven't already. and until, next time. see you later!
