Solar Eclipse Data Collection Project

Between 1600 – 2015 UTC on August 21, 2017, as the solar eclipse swept across the nation, I captured much of the lower 2 MHz of the radio frequency spectrum.  I used a Microtelecom Perseus SDR, a 130′ inverted L with four radials, and lots of disk space.  In doing so, I have created a permanent record of this portion of the RF spectrum during the solar eclipse.

I am making the spectrum capture files available for your analysis and research.  Each file contains a 5 minute segment.  If you download a group of files, they will play in succession.

You can use the demo version of the Perseus software or any other software that can read the Perseus data, such as Linrad or HDSDR.  You cannot use just an audio player to play the files, even though they have .wav extensions.

Should you perform any analysis or otherwise make use of the files, I’d like to hear from you in the comments below.

Special thanks to Jav, K4JH, for donating the original hosting site and bandwidth for this effort and to the Internet Archive for their work in preserving content.

RTL-SDR on the Cheap SWL Fest Links

As promised during Thursday afternoon’s presentation at the SWL Fest, here are the links for RTL software and info mentioned. If you attended the presentation, I hope that you enjoyed it and found it useful.

SDR#, a flexible SDR app for Windows with MANY plugins
DSD+, decodes P25, DMR, Fusion, DStar (data only), and others
Virtual Audio Cable, a virtual patch cable to send the output of one program into the input of another
Unitrunker, analog and digital trunk tracker with lots of data decoding
HDSDR, a software radio that can also make use of the RTL-SDR hardware
Linrad, for those who prefer to work in a Linux or Mac environment
DAB Player, requires the original (not Zadig WinUSB drivers

The Big List of RTL Supported Software
RTL-SDR.ru, in Russian, but Google Translate is your friend.

Update: I have added the video narratives as a YouTube playlist.

Correction: During the talk I stated that I thought the MCX connector used on the earlier DVB-T dongles appeared to be the same as the connector used on some Sirius satellite receivers.  I just took a close look and realized that while they are somewhat similar in appearance, the Sirius connector is larger and is actually an SMB connector.