A new toy

PLUTO bits

I received a new toy for my birthday (thanks Anne for your contribution!). It’s an Analog Devices ADALM-PLUTO – “supporting future engineers during their formative years” it says on the box. That’s me 🙂

It’s a software defined radio – both receive and transmit, from 325MHz to 3.8GHz even before I do any naughty things to it. The receive side certainly works: here’s a shot of some mobile phone stuff as seen using gqrx.

Screenshot of gqrx software in use with ADALM-PLUTO

Where it really scores on receive over the RTL-SDR dongle is that it can cover a much wider frequency range; you can see 20MHz in this image, which is (I presume) a load of mobile phone stuff in the DCS-1800 band. This was received on the little bit of wire which came with the DVB-T dongle – it’s almost as strong on the tiny antenna that came with the Pluto device. Many thanks Analog Devices! – I am going to have a lot of fun with this.