How I configured a DVB dongle to pick up radio instead
Configure a Realtek DVB-T dongle to perform as a multi-band radio receiver.
There is very good software on Linux to listen to various transmissions on VHF and UHF bands, Gqrx is the best I have found. This works with the USB TV dongle I have, using the Realtek chipset. I have put custom firmware on it and I can now use it to listen to UHF radio broadcasts. This is a great use of a piece of hardware that would otherwise be wasted watching television. TV is just horrible these days. Absolute trash.
I just use the settings shown above to allow my dongle to receive UHF radio. It can also get FM radio, not TV sound though since television broadcasts are digital now and it cannot be picked up by an SDR dongle AFAIK unless it still has the TV firmware on it. An SDR dongle can also be used to eavesdrop on computers and other electronic devices. Here is a link to Windows software that can remotely spy on a computer and display the computer screen. This is not perfect, but better results would be obtained with a directional antenna. This software requires Java and might work on Linux as well as Windows, this goes to show what kind of monitoring can be done from outside a premises. So, there are many uses for SDR radio, this is not new though, it has always been possible with computer monitors, to pick up the electromagnetic emissions and reconstruct the signal to show what was on the screen.
But I could not get Wims to install on my Ubuntu machine, so I cannot get the source to fully compile. I will keep at it and see what I can do. Getting back to monitoring remote screens, there was even a way to eavesdrop on a CRT screen by picking up the reflected flickering light from the screen and reconstructing an image from it. Read about this here: https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/posters/mgk25-optical.pdf. That is amazing, but this is not using an SDR. But I thought it would be an amazing thing to read about. More realistic than the super zoom and enhance in CSI.
Here is a guide for Windows on how to set up your DVB-T dongle for SDR. This is the one I followed to convert my Realtek dongle to SDR. After this process, it will not work for DVB anymore.
https://www.rtl-sdr.com/rtl-sdr-quick-start-guide/. A dongle configured like this can also pick up AM transmissions at 126 MHZ. I use this to pick up aircraft conversations from the airport. 126.953 MHZ AM to be precise. Frequencies vary around the world I assume. The user could purchase a 10m coaxial cable and a cheap indoor TV antenna and use that placed in a window to pick up some nice conversations, even UHF CB and ambulance transmissions to find out what is happening in the local area.
To scan multiple frequencies, use this software, which is scanner software to scan a frequency range and record transmissions.
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