RNO-G/pi_rfi_checker
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This is a very stupid, very quickly-hacked together RFI monitor running on a
raspberry pi.
Components:
- Raspberry pi 3 A+ (Any would probably work just as well... just that the
extra components on the B are not needed)
- An RTL-SDR dongle (I used the NOOELEC NESDR Smart v4)
- A GPS that communicates over UART (I used the
parallax sim33eau GPS module), which is connected to the appropriate RPI
UART pins.
The RPI must be set up to enable UART (can be done via raspi-config) and is
assumed to have a /data directory (here this is a FAT32 partition that was
mounted there... this ensures that this could be mounted on any system).
You need to set up rtl_power_fftw (https://github.com/AD-Vega/rtl-power-fftw),
which requires a few things (obviously librtlsdr, fftw) and also GPSd (and GPSd
must be instructed to use the correct device). If you want to use fftw wisdom,
you need to use my forked version (or wait for my pull request to be accepted).
The code takes an rtl_power_fftw scan (with parameters defined in /data/config)
and saves it in /data. Each time its run, the run number is incremented (using
/data/counter, which will probably be created if it doesn't exist). Each scan
saves the binary and met file into a temp ramdisk and then is copied to the
appropriate directory in data. Concurrently, the GPS data is streamed to a csv
file. Because the RFI monitor is likely not connected to internet the RTC time
can't be trusted by the GPS time can. Also the GPS position might be useful
sometimes. The GPS and scan data are packaged together into sequential .tar.gz files.
To run on startup, install the systemd service and enable it.