Get Started with Software Defined Radio (SDR) using Windows 8

August 23rd at 12:00am

After attendind DEF CON earlier this month I decided to try out the SDR dongle that I had bought a few months back and hadn't tried. As I'll want to go mobile, I decided to set everything up on my cheap Windows 8 laptop.

While it wasn't hard to get everything setup once I had the necessary steps, it did take me awhile to find the necessary steps to get things working.

References

 

Installation

In order to get everything to a workable state I ran through these steps:

  • Visit the SDR# downloads page and grabbed the sdr-install.zip file under the section titled Important note for RTL-SDR users. This is important as if you grab the 'SDR# stable' build nothing will work (in my experience, anyway)
  • Download the latest non-xp version of zadig from sourceforge
  • Plugin my USB SDR (RTL2832U based, if anyone is curious)
     
  • Open zadig and select List All Devices from the options menu
  • In the Zadig Device drop-down, Select your device. The community quick start guide says that you should see a 'Bulk-In, Interface' option but that was not the case for me. I saw my device listed by chipset instead
  • In the Details area, make sure that the VID and PID match your chipset (Chipset and expected values table here)
  • In the Driver area make sure that WinUSB is selected
  • Click the Install Driver button
     
  • Extract the sdr-install.zip file and run install.bat from an Elevated Command Prompt.
    • I just right-clicked on cmd.exe and selected Run as Administrator before executing the script
  • Open SDRSharp.exe
  • Within SDRSharp, select the drop-down menu beside the Play button and select RTL-SDR / USB

 

Using SDR#

Maybe it's just me, but I found the SDR# UI to be a bit confusing at first. Once I figured out a few things I was able to get the hang of it and do some scanning. Here are a few UI notes about SDR#:

  • The drop-down menu next to the play button is where you select the SDR device you want to listen from.
    • This was a bit confusing for me as I was thinking this would be where you wanted to play your intercepted signal TO rather than where to read it FROM.
       
  • The numbers next to VFO are where you select what frequency you want to listen in to. From what I can see, you have to click on each number to get it to change. Doesn't look like I can just type in a number and have it 'take'

  • Once you are listening with your SDR you can use your mouse to manually drag the Spectrum Analyzer window left and right to adjust the frequencies that are visible.

  • There are more options to select from if you scroll-down in the left hand column. I didn't even notice the left side had a scrollable column as the scrollbar and scroll arrows don't really stand out all that much

Once you know where everything is and start scanning, it is pretty straightforward to use the spectrum analyzer and waterfall graphs to look for interesting signals.