You're going to have trouble covering 50M to 2GHz with a single antenna. Sounds like yours is working well for 80MHz - 120MHz.

You should see some stuff around 433MHz like garage door remotes. Same with 900MHz. But again you need the right antenna for it.

Also, if you don't have one already, an FM bandstop filter might be helpful, as the FM stations will often overpower the dongles.

You can cover lots of strong signals with any basic (inappropriate) antenna. And if you want something cheap that tunes then get a telescope dipole, and set the length correctly (and maybe also polarization). In either case, height / clear line of sight is much more important than a good antenna.

But I'd start with the most basic question - is your antenna even outside of the building? :)

> But I'd start with the most basic question - is your antenna even outside of the building? :)

Why not monitor electrical interference inside the home? You could work out when your dishwasher has finished, the different parts of a washing machine program, vacuum cleaner, when the kettle is switched on and off, the fridge/freezer, tv, hifi, lights.

You can learn alot about peoples home life and their patterns just from picking up electrical interference of devices. Who needs to hack CCTV to see inside someone's house? :)

I interviewed at a startup building a product that was doing exactly that. Well, it was a sensor on the mains power but same idea.

The RaspberryPi is very versatile.

https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?t=27922#p248364

What does it take to make an antenna of sorts?

Now who trusts their operating systems?

Because he is just starting, so it will be a lot easier to pick up the many usual signals that exist pretty much everywhere. Like broadcast, police/emergency radio, pagers, aircraft comms or data, satellites, HF communication, ...

They might be in an otherwise radio silent part of the world though. And how hard is it recording the electrical interference of a device from the same room and then from other rooms, to establish the variability of its electrical "interference/signal" properties?

Knowing about the Theremin, a Russian electrical instrument invented in 1919, is similar to walking around a house with mains electricity is an audible example of the interference in our homes which we interact with. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QgTF8p-284

Could even do human detecting wifi signals. https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10103371/1/Passive%20W...

If someone can detect multiple wifi signals, the are effectively inside a phased array radar system.

> They might be in an otherwise radio silent part of the world though

> Could even do human detecting wifi signals

I can confidently say that you have never tried to do anything with radio.

I've experienced it, because I have FE(II,III) in me, so have you.

https://web.gps.caltech.edu/~jkirschvink/pdfs/JoeMicrowave.p...

https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2019AGUFMGP23B0794P/abstra...

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1613349113#:~:text=In%....

Still confident or have you spent too long on your mobile phone that you cant remember?

The quieter you become, the more you are able to hear.