rtl_power:(1)

NAME
rtl_power: - wideband spectrum monitor utility

DESCRIPTION
Uses a re-purposed DVB-T receiver as a software defined radio to receive signals in I/Q data form. Written for and incorporated in the osmocom rtl-sdr project.

USAGE
rtl_power, a simple FFT logger for RTL2832 based DVB-T receivers

This tool gathers signal data over a very wide area of the frequency spectrum, and then that data can be used to find active areas of the spectrum.

Use: rtl_power -f freq_range [-options] [filename]

-f lower:upper:bin_size [Hz]

    (bin size is a maximum, smaller more convenient bins

will be used.
    valid range 1Hz - 2.8MHz)

    [-i integration_interval (default: 10 seconds)]

    (buggy if a full sweep takes longer than the interval)

    [-1 enables single-shot mode (default: off)] [-e exit_timer (default: off/0)] [-d device_index (default: 0)] [-g tuner_gain (default: automatic)] [-p ppm_error (default: 0)] filename (a '-' dumps samples to stdout)

    (omitting the filename also uses stdout)

  Experimental options:

    [-w window (default: rectangle)]

    (hamming, blackman, blackman-harris, hann-poisson, bartlett, youssef)

    [-c crop_percent (default: 0%, recommended: 20%-50%)]

    (discards data at the edges, 100% discards everything) (has no effect for bins larger than 1MHz)

    [-F fir_size (default: disabled)]

    (enables low-leakage downsample filter,

fir_size can be 0 or 9.
    0 has bad roll off,

    try with '-c 50%')

    [-P enables peak hold (default: off)] [-D enable direct sampling (default: off)] [-O enable offset tuning (default: off)]

  CSV FFT output columns:

    date, time, Hz low, Hz high, Hz step, samples, dbm, dbm, ...

EXAMPLES

    rtl_power -f 88M:108M:125k fm_stations.csv

    (creates 160 bins across the FM band,

    individual stations should be visible)

    rtl_power -f 100M:1G:1M -i 5m -1 survey.csv

    (a five minute low res scan of nearly everything)

    rtl_power -f ... -i 15m -1 log.csv

    (integrate for 15 minutes and exit afterwards)

    rtl_power -f ... -e 1h | gzip > log.csv.gz

    (collect data for one hour and compress it on the fly)

  Convert CSV to a waterfall graphic with:

    http://kmkeen.com/tmp/heatmap.py.txt

rtl_power, a simple FFT logger for RTL2832 based DVB-T receivers

Use: rtl_power -f freq_range [-options] [filename]

-f lower:upper:bin_size [Hz]

    (bin size is a maximum, smaller more convenient bins

will be used.
    valid range 1Hz - 2.8MHz)

    [-i integration_interval (default: 10 seconds)]

    (buggy if a full sweep takes longer than the interval)

    [-1 enables single-shot mode (default: off)] [-e exit_timer (default: off/0)] [-d device_index (default: 0)] [-g tuner_gain (default: automatic)] [-p ppm_error (default: 0)] filename (a '-' dumps samples to stdout)

    (omitting the filename also uses stdout)

  Experimental options:

    [-w window (default: rectangle)]

    (hamming, blackman, blackman-harris, hann-poisson, bartlett, youssef)

    [-c crop_percent (default: 0%, recommended: 20%-50%)]

    (discards data at the edges, 100% discards everything) (has no effect for bins larger than 1MHz)

    [-F fir_size (default: disabled)]

    (enables low-leakage downsample filter,

fir_size can be 0 or 9.
    0 has bad roll off,

    try with '-c 50%')

    [-P enables peak hold (default: off)] [-D enable direct sampling (default: off)] [-O enable offset tuning (default: off)]

  CSV FFT output columns:

    date, time, Hz low, Hz high, Hz step, samples, dbm, dbm, ...

    rtl_power -f 88M:108M:125k fm_stations.csv

    (creates 160 bins across the FM band,

    individual stations should be visible)

    rtl_power -f 100M:1G:1M -i 5m -1 survey.csv

    (a five minute low res scan of nearly everything)

    rtl_power -f ... -i 15m -1 log.csv

    (integrate for 15 minutes and exit afterwards)

    rtl_power -f ... -e 1h | gzip > log.csv.gz

    (collect data for one hour and compress it on the fly)

  Convert CSV to a waterfall graphic with:

    http://kmkeen.com/tmp/heatmap.py.txt

SEE ALSO

RTL-SDR wiki documentation: http://sdr.osmocom.org/trac/wiki/rtl-sdr

Other rtl-sdr programs:

rtl_adsb(1), rtl_eeprom(1), rtl_fm(1), rtl_sdr(1), rtl_tcp(1), rtl_test(1)

AUTHOR
This manual page was written by Maitland Bottoms for the Debian project (but may be used by others).

COPYRIGHT
Copyright (c) 2013 A. Maitland Bottoms <bottoms@debian.org>

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.