RTL SDR Device
Traditional radio is implemented in analogue hardware components such as the modulator, demodulator and tuners. The signal is processed by fixed analogue hardware and not flexible for varying configuration. Modern advancement in computing and analogue-to-digital converters allows most of the analogue components to be implemented in software instead. This enable digital signal processing to be performed on varying scale, thereby making it a cheap wide band radio.
There are many types of SDR in the market with wide range of prices. Different types such as the Airspy ($169) and SDRPlay ($99) SDR's which are currently the best low cost RX only SDR's. There is also the HackRF ($300USD) which can both transmit and receive. The RTL-SDR is our obvious choice because RTL-SDR is a very cheap ~$25 USB dongle compared to the others. It can be used as a computer based radio scanner for receiving live radio signals without the internet. The particular model used for this project could receive frequencies from 500 kHz up to 1.75 GHz. Most software for the RTL-SDR is also community developed, and provided free of charge. ( thumbs up for the open source community 👍).
To boost the signal received, the usage of a low noise amplifier was required. We used a really cheap high frequency, low noise transistor for the amplification. It has a nominal amplification of 20 decibels.
SatRot - Taking everyone to space!!!