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Things I want to improve:
Operating Skills
Scanning, Monitoring, Signals Collection
Hey Smurf,
When it comes to Scanning/Monitoring and Signal Collection, probably the best thing you can do -gear wise- is to start using an SDR receiver.
Running an SDR, all the most important parts of your "equipment" are software, so it's easy to try different things and find what's best for you.
Trunking decoders, protocol decoders, noise reduction "filters", and adding entirely new modes to your capabilities is all done in software.
After trying several RTL/SDR "dongles" and other solutions that were of limited use, I found the SDRPlay, and it's a pretty amazing piece of gear.
http://www.sdrplay.com/I now have two of their RSP-2 receivers, and with them I can capture 16Mhz of spectrum for immediate monitoring, and for recording to HD for later review. I mostly use them for MF/HF monitoring and capture, but the RSP receivers cover all the way up into the lower microwave spectrum, and they do a very nice job as an SDS (Software Defined Scanner) for VHF/UHF.
I already have several (hardware) scanners covering VHF/UHF; and I live way out in the country so there's not much to be heard unless I point my beams at one of the urban areas... so my focus is more towards MF/HF monitoring - but I have a friend who lives in a very urban area - he's right in the thick of things V/UHF wise being <20 miles from the state capital. I brought one of my RSP-2s to his place and we used his existing scanner antenna to try it out in a high-RF environment and it did very well. So well that he ordered one for himself - he now has it covering all the frequencies that two of his older scanners had been. He really likes the fact that if he records the direct-sampled RF spectrum to his HDD, then
he can go back later and look for activity on frequencies that he didn't even have programmed when the recording was made. Taking that concept to the extreme, I don't 'program frequencies' at all - I select chunks of spectrum and record them, then go back and look for the interesting bits later. As I do a better job building tools and scripts to search through these massive recordings,
I am missing less and less of what pass through the MF/HF spectrum because I don't 'scan', I Data-Mine the recordings.I will probably buy another one or two RSPs as soon as budget permits, because I want to be able to set up a
remote-receive station and 'pipe' it back to me as a private WEB-SDR (and share it with a few friends). The remote-receive site I'm looking at is extremely RF quiet, and is far enough away from my friends and I so that we could run Full Duplex on MF/HF -- and not de-sense the remote RX site even if we ran 1500 watts. Cheap laptop + SDRplay receiver + Internet connection = a high-quality, private remote-RX facility that you can access from anywhere. <-- It's becoming really easy to do stuff like this with the newer technologies available, so the whole monitoring scene is changing rapidly Best of all, they're very inexpensive for what they can do - the RSP-1 is less than $150 now, and the RSP-2 was $189 when I bought mine, I think they have/are going to lower that to $169.
The first SDR I ever bought was an Icom PCR1500 back in 2001/2, and I don't even want to tell you what it cost. The SDRPlay receivers do way more than the PCR1500 ever dreamed of, and have a much better software front end (SDR-Uno application) than anything else available right now.
Cheers
