This site represents some of the research being done for a book I'm considering writing. As a member and President of the Suncoast Chapter of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers, I was asked back around 2010 to write a book on my career in the intelligence community. Apparently some think my experiences were colorful. Writing a book simply about me just didn't excite me.
Recently my wife and I were lucky enough to sell both our businesses and "the big" house. We're retired now, but still very active. This, along with major eye surgery which debilitated me for approximately six months, I came up with some ideas of experiments I wanted to try. Some of these go back 50 years, while others came later or recently. All of this has lead to the concept for "the book".
If you are not familiar with the movie "Red Dawn", here's a quick cliff note:
The United States is invaded and occupied by a foriegn force. Those who defy the occupiers are put into concentration camps. Some high school kids manage to escape the initial invasion and hide in the mountians. They perform operations against the occupiers. A Very Classic American Response.
The book will be something along the lines of a survival and preparedness guide for a Red Dawn Scenario. It covers likely conditions of invasion and/or occupation and how to organize and equip resistance cells.
The Experiments section is my documentation on the research I've done on what low cost technologies already exist today, what items can be repurposed, and how these could assist a resistance effort.
This site was created in 2007. I have only edited the typos. It is still relivant. The biggest idea here is the following: The same technology to look up at the stars is exactly the same technology used to look down from above or to otherwise observe other items of interest.
No specific application of this technology has been assigned yet. The end game is to see if one can, with a very low cost spectrometer, measure the amount or existance of certain organic compounds in samples. The results are very encouraging, as we can measure down to one nanometer wavelength in the visible and very near infrared spectrums with our under $100 spectrometer.
The particular SDR I purchased was from Amazon Prime (for free returns - no questions asked) was: 0.1MHz-1.7GHz RTL-SDR Radio Receiver, TCXO Full-Band RTL-SDR w/Extended Tuning Range AM, FM (NFM, WFM), CW, DSB, LSB, USB SDR Radio Receiver, Software Defined Radio
There are several that appear to be the same, eg, showing the same range. This one has the Q branch prewired to use the input antenna. EG, it is ready to go out of the box, with the below software.
The needed software to make the modified dongle work: https://airspy.com/download/
Here's a link to some instructions - scroll down some: https://www.rtl-sdr.com/rtl-sdr-quick-start-guide/ or I summarized them here:
Choose the first download - the whole package.
Unzip into a folder you want the software to reside in.
Run the install-rtlsdr.bat file. This installs zadig.exe
If WINusb driver is not installed, use the zadig.exe program in the zip to install it. zadig will tell you if a driver is installed or not. See https://zadig.akeo.ie/
Open SDRsharp.exe
Before pressing the start button, if you are selecting frequencies below 28.8 mhz, then go to settings and under the branch select - pick the Q branch and you may need to change the gain to 48 or 49.6.
For above 28.8, turn the branch select back to qradrature sampling - gain doesn't seem to matter with this setting.
Don't be surprised if the airspy program crashes when you reconfigure the driver after starting the receiver the first time.
The following are interesting sites for sdr:
https://www.rtl-sdr.com/an-interesting-rtl-sdr-direct-sampling-modification/
https://www.rtl-sdr.com/rtl-sdr-direct-sampling-mode/
https://www.rtl-sdr.com/rtl-sdr-blog-v-3-dongles-user-guide/
http://superkuh.com/rtlsdr.html#directsample
https://osmocom.org/projects/rtl-sdr/wiki
https://www.reddit.com/r/RTLSDR/comments/maoehy/hf_long_random_wire_shape_questions/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fu-HubyHP3Q
3 Links from the video:https://www.hamuniverse.com/randomwireantennalengths.html
This article says my 52 ft dipole is not a good length, specifically. How nice :)https://palomar-engineers.com/ferrite-products/ferrite-cores/ferrite-mix-selection
https://www.rtl-sdr.com/new-experimental-r820t-rtl-sdr-driver-tunes-13-mhz-lower/
https://www.short-wave.info/index.php
Look up stations - but a lot of them are not listed.