if you folks haven't dropped $20 for a usb dongle and antenna to try out http://www.rtl-sdr.com you're really missing out. I've known about it for
years but just picked one up the other week, I work in a flight operations
team and we communicate over simple FM radios at 150Mhz or so, and I thought
it would be neat to log our communications in timecoded database along with
our videos and telemetry data, just for the sake of "log all the data" seems
to always pay off one way or another, and I had a basic scanner working within an hour of opening the box.

Though I must admit, even as a programmer of dozens of languages, including
the ones commonly used in this space (C, C# and Python), all of this free software, mostly for Windows and Linux, is really just janky. I looked for anybody who would take $100 to make a GUI with some programmable features, but there aren't many suiters. For something as cheap and interesting as these software-defined radios, I was dissapointed for lack of good windows software. Anyway I just happened to use windows because its the work-assigned craptop
OS, looking forward to GNURadio, which looks pretty darn good from the
outside, anybody else doing GNURadio and SDR-RTL?

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