In general, I find these kinds of comments strange.

There are many applications I might find more interesting too. However rather than criticizing others I spend my time feeling vaguely guilty for not doing any of them...

There are two ways to read a comment that says "I don't find this [useful|inspiring|interesting]." The first is to take it as a criticism, and the second is to take it as a statement of fact that is strictly limited to the person saying it. Where it's ambiguous it's far better to assume the second meaning, if only due to the Principle of Charity.

I suppose that the concept I was trying to articulate was better expressed as follows: "It is quite unfortunate that the baseline "Hello World!"-type project for SDR is listening in to airliners' telemetry, as it is widely available by other means, entails RX-only skills and equipment, and does not really provide wide avenues for later development".

That is, of course, my personal opinion, but it is also something of a critique: wouldn't people be more excited if the baseline project involved TX/RX, obviously with slightly more involved hardware (and limited to ISM bands & transmission power limitations)?

The baseline "Hello World" has always seemed to me to be capturing the full FM spectrum. I think that was the first example given in Gnuradio.

I know the posted article is nothing new, but it doesn't seem like a great idea to discourage people from writing up their experiments, even if it isn't anything amazing and new...

I agree, I found this post really inspiring to go out and spend a few pounds on getting some equipment to try some of these things out... I might well be far more interested in some of the other applications, but this post is a cool idea of what can easily be done...

I built something like this and several others. I'm far more interested in RX/TX projects though.

Thanks.. I appreciate the comment

> Surely we can come up with something more interesting and potentially discovery-orientated, or at least a little more awesome, such as perhaps radio astronomy or somesuch?

There are a many examples of other things that people have come up with. head over to http://www.rtl-sdr.com/ and the "Tutorials" section (under "Featured Articles") includes these:

* ADS-B Aircraft Radar

* NOAA Weather Satellites

* Meteor-M Weather Satellites

* P25 Digital Voice Decoding

* Trunked Radio Following

* TETRA Voice Decoding

* ACARS Decoding

* DRM Radio Decoding

* AIS Ship Tracking

* Radio Astronomy

* POCSAG Pager Decoding

* Decoding Weather Balloons

* Analyzing GSM Signals

* Measuring Filter Characteristics

* Inmarsat STD-C NCS EGC Decoding

* Outernet

I tried building the ACARS Decoding code actually and was just getting segfaults. I need to go back to that at some point and raise a Github issue.

Very good list of applications above!

I agree. The only advantage ADS-B has is that it doesn't require building an antenna unless you want a lot of range.

I've found that receiving weather satellite images makes for a much more interesting project, and seeing live satellite images tends to interest people a lot more than knowing where planes are.

I find it interesting that Flight Aware (alone) has 12m active users. Hopefully for those who haven't "been there and done that" this will give an accessible intro to SDR and the use of containers for IoT

I find it to be a pretty fun and interesting hobby. I'm regularly picking up transmissions from 200+ miles away which to me is pretty neat. For extra fun, put up a big ol VHF antenna and receive ATC communications as well--you'll need a second SDR for that. Then try to figure out which flight on your plot corresponds to which airband communication.

The title made me think of receiving satellite images from weather satellites: http://www.rtl-sdr.com/rtl-sdr-tutorial-receiving-noaa-weath...