I never really got into ham, I'm still not much of a radio person (I prefer wired) but I still had fun playing with RTL-SDR; listening to my car's tire pressure monitors and various other things in the ISM band. Antennas are still fairly spooky magic to me, though.
In a dark room it would be played onto a TV screen with a very slow horizontal rate, vertical retrace would be done manually with a switch and the vertical increments were extracted form the signal. In front of the TV we'd place a bunch of cameras, we'd open the shutter at the start of the pass and close them at the end. At the end of the night we'd develop the film - the meteorology people who'd paid hundreds of thousands of $$ for ground stations were pissed that we were getting better quality images than their fax machines.
Also around midniught local time (in NZ) we'd pick up processed world images - 4 around each pole and 4 around the equator, with the country boundaries overlaid, and the communist countries carefully whited out
I mean, today you can even see north Korea on Google maps :)
Turns out the balcony sensor was just that little bit too far away to be regularly detected. However I noticed that I could get temperature readings from the car-tyres parked in the carpark to the side of my flat.
So I switched to using those instead for my "outdoor" temperature. Works a little better than my balcony would have done, as that is glazed and warmer than the actual outdoor temperature.
https://twitter.com/systematikk/status/1072960631916027904
Last I checked, they were using Windows XP freeware for data encryption.
There's also the shortwave radiogram and other interesting stuff if you go deep. The portable receivers and straight up SDRs they sell these days are pretty amazing in terms of sheer availability.
This receiver has been fun to use on the go:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3WQQn7rM3k
And the more consumer receiver stuff is now starting to ship with remote app control as well. A pretty awesome time for radio really.
It's kind of like the old adage in audio where you can have the best sources, AMPs, scalers, etc... but your speakers are the crucial component.
In RF, it's really is about the antennas.
Radios are fascinating. Optimizing and enhancing your radio capabilities is a black hole of time and money, but in return you gain knowledge and satisfaction.
NanoVNA to tune the dipole (1/4l), gain is fixed, autogain off, move the dipole around the antenna with sufficient attenuation on the transmitter (or even better, rotate the antenna itself), and you can get reasonably accurate radiation graphs. Also tuning an antenna with a NanoVNA is very easy and if the antenna geometry is simple enough, orientation is simple too.
10+ years ago, you needed a friend working at a local college to take you in at night to measure stuff :)
After many years of playing with SDRs I've actually went the other way around and got licensed as a ham radio operator, even though it's obvious that the old school rag-chewing is soon to be a relic of the past.
I'm super interested to see what the next generation of RF hackers and ham radio operators will look like, given the ongoing consolidation of RF applications into software.
I wish I had gotten into it earlier, but I was discourage by a university professor who basically told my senior design groups that radios were too finicky for us to tackle.
Now I participate in amateur radio and I suggest anyone who finds the topics interesting to do the same.
https://www.rtl-sdr.com/a-comprehensive-beginners-guide-to-h...
Actually even the HRPT streams are seem to be phasing out, but will be supported on the MetOp line for a long time (MetOp-B has been launched in 2012, the -C in 2018, and the satellites generally have a 15 years of lifetime). Future live streams will be transmitted in the 5 GHz+ range, which needs an even more complex antenna and probably a downconverter.
PySDR I'll have to check out.
