ECE497 Notes on Rtlizer

Rtlizer is a simple spectrum analyzer written for the BeagleBone. Rtlizer uses rtl-sdr a command line tool to interface with software defined radios such as the R820T used here.

Installation
Instructions for installing rtl-sdr and rtlizer can be found here. They are copied here for convenience.

Run the following as root on the BeagleBone:

git clone git://git.osmocom.org/rtl-sdr.git cd rtl-sdr/ autoreconf -i ./configure make make install mv /usr/local/lib/pkgconfig/librtlsdr.pc /usr/lib/pkgconfig ldconfig

git clone git://github.com/csete/rtlizer.git cd rtlizer ./build-target

How to Run
In X11 run the following:

cd rtlizer rtlizer 640x360+0+0

Conclusion
This site contains more information about rtl-sdr including a long list of SDR applications that use the library.

The R820T is a very nice (and cheap) SDR with some nice functionality. One thing that it cannot do however (at least in the US) is function as a TV tuner. The tuner uses the DVB-T standard. ATSC is the standard used for digital TV broadcasting in the US.

Future Work
It would be interesting to do some radio decoding on the BeagleBone using rtl-sdr as a back-end to the R820T. A possible application could be something like ADS-B (aircraft tracking) or NOAA (weather satellite) decoding.