I built a tool to help me monitor the various transmissions of a local radio channel. What happens is aircraft at different distances can cause “blow out” on my transceiver, so I wanted a tool that will let me monitor the variety of transmissions there are so I can gauge gain values when I tune a receiver and/or know what the power gamut is.
Here’s an example of my monitoring signals in a console that follows a log where entries are added every 250 milliseconds:
White is the lowest power indicating no transmission activity, and red is the highest power — indicating someone is transmitting, e.g. speaking. The yellow and green represent weak signals from aircraft that are too far away from my antenna, there’s enough of a signal to indicate activity, but the signal is so weak, I probably could not demodulate it into anything that could be understood.
The project is iq_guard at https://github.com/jlpoolen/iq_sentry. It is built in Rust and people who want to use the tool would need to compile their own binary.
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