AR-DV1 SDR control Turbo Scanning!

[jarvis_road]

Hi, I have implemented FFT based scanning of the AR-DV1 from an SDR. I did this by creating an OnmiRig control file for the radio and running the OmniRig plugin under SDRSharp. SDRSharp will automatically tune the radio when you click on a frequency in the waterfall display or from the frequency scanner plugin. With this plugin the entire military airband can be scanned in about 3 seconds! You do need an SDR dongle in addition to the DV-1. Required files and instructions are available on my group:

Log into Facebook

Log into Facebook to start sharing and connecting with your friends, family, and people you know.

www.facebook.com

 

[woodpecker]

Although its quite interesting its the dongle doing the scanning not the DV1, if the dongle finds the signal you can just listen on the dongle, I don't really see much use for this?

 

[marlbrook]

Although its quite interesting its the dongle doing the scanning not the DV1, if the dongle finds the signal you can just listen on the dongle

On the face of it I tend to agree, however it is an interesting achievement, and I congratulate you without reservation..

As Woodpecker says in reality one is relying on the efficiency of the Dongle to find each signal. If it is as efficient as the DV1 in doing that, there seems little point in not just listening to the Dongle's audio output. If it is not, then there are obvious limitations.

However, if you can achieve it, why not look at the possibility of using the Dongle and DV1 in combination to find and track Trunked systems.

There have been a lot of posts regarding the lack of Trunking ability of the AR-DV1. I think I read there is SDR software available that achieves Trunking. Although to a degree my above comments still apply, having the SDR dongle tuned to the base frequency, playing its audio via a P.C., and the SDR software find the trunked one, then directing the DV1 to automatically monitor and output that, would make for a really interesting combination.

In any case, well done.

At one time I gave consideration to the Dongle idea re. adding trunking to the DV1, but found there were many other things I wanted to add to eSPYonARD, so did not go any further with that.

 

[marlbrook]

The DV1 cannot achieve very high speed scanning. Controlling scanning / searching externally there is definitely an upper limit, beyond which the Radio may appear to be going faster, but then it cannot cope with stopping on an open frequency.

This is the main speed limiting factor in the Band Scope I created for it. Although USB/SERIAL speeds are a factor, the biggest one is that after a particular point the DV1 just cannot cope speed-wise.

Nevertheless the eSPYonARD Scope operates as quickly as the DV1 allows, and many people (including myself initially) believed it could not be done, lol.

I compensated for that by giving the Band Scope lots of inter-active features that make it a useful addition, which includes automatic stopping on a discovered frequency, with selectable pause times, and automatic creation / saving of intelligent lists in the process.

As I said, I think your current work is very interesting, and praiseworthy. Well done.

Of course effectively having to hook up two receiving systems will not be to all tastes, and has other limitations particularly if the DV1 is being controlled by the same P.C. where truly sophisticated control programs require a lot of processing power, and USB/SERIAL control / exchanges.

Nevertheless, if you can achieve the type of Trunk Tracking abilities I described, that would make the SDR Dongle approach an attractive option, notwithstanding the physical drawbacks.

I hope you continue with this idea. Please keep us informed re. any progress, particularly the Trunk Tracking ideas I mentioned.

 

[jarvis_road]

Regardless of opinion on one receiver tuning another, this is an extremely fast scanning setup. I’ve just measured <4 seconds to search through the following bands: Ham 2m/70cm; Civil air; Marine; VHF/UHF PMR; Mil air - a total of 229MHz. When a signal is found, the DV1 just does it’s job automatically decoding analogue or digital modulation without additional setup. If it's performance in this respect is worse than the dongle then I'd agree that you may as well just listen to that.

SDRSharp can store new frequencies and perform a lookup on found frequencies (this can be done with the UK Wireless Telegraphy Register database using one of the parsers I have made available on my group). And you can record audio on either the radio or PC. All this for the price of a cheap RTL dongle (the software is free) is pretty good considering we already blew £1k on the radio...

 

[dmaria]

I think this has a lot of potential. I can imagine using the dongle to do the searching at a much faster scanning rate, and then storing those newfound frequencies automaticaly in the DV1 for later use.

 

[morfis]

Only avialable using farceblog or is there a real website as well?

 

[woodpecker]

Regardless of opinion on one receiver tuning another, this is an extremely fast scanning setup. I’ve just measured <4 seconds to search through the following bands: Ham 2m/70cm; Civil air; Marine; VHF/UHF PMR; Mil air - a total of 229MHz.

The only fast part is the dongle though, the expensive DV1 is adding nothing

 

[DeepBlue]

I can see this as being invaluable as the dongles cannot directly decode the various digital formats the DV-1 can. So, if the dongle is simply finding a frequency in use and flipping the DV-1 to that frequency, the DV-1 in it's auto format mode can figure out the digital method used, decode the audio and listen in, record and/or log it. A stand alone dongle cannot do all this without DSD+, etc and even then, does DSD decode all the formats the DV-1 can?

There is a bigger picture here some may be missing. This is good news indeed. Keep up the excellent work.

Sean

 

[woodpecker]

The DV1 doesn't decode P25 Phase 2 or NXDN 9600 so you still need to run DSD+ to decode those modes anyway. The DV1 also doesn't show much digital info, it doesn't even show TGIDs or RIDs, the DV1 digital decoding is poor compared to DSD+

 

[DeepBlue]

Still it is clever so don't dismiss the concept out of hand because you found a different method that works for you.

S.