LOW COST SDR RECEIVER IMPLEMENTATION USING RTL-SDR DONGLE

Abstract

The advent of Software Defined Radio (SDR) has made it possible to replace large parts of classical radio communication equipment with digital and software components to easily achieve configurable and multiplatform communication systems. SDR provides many advantages for research and development. In this work, the low-cost Realtek Software Defined Radio (RTL-SDR) dongle can serve as a cheap SDR platform to receive and digitize exchanged RF signals. In case of RTL-SDR dongle, in-phase and quadrature samples (I/Q) are sent as a stream through simple Universal Serial Bus interface (USB) to host computer. This paper describes a SDR application that can be used for many functionalities such as monitoring and scanning of frequency bands with RTL-SDR dongle.