Radioamateur high speed data links in my area are underutilized 🙂 We have several webcams (capable of streaming H.264) , some servers, APRS gateways, a very busy Skimmer connected to dx cluster network … but all this rarely generate more than couple of Mbit/s. This evening I combined Raspberry Pi with USB DVB-T dongle into high performance network traffic generator. The initial idea was different 🙂 I wanted to experiment with SDR stuff on R_Pi. I compiled rtl-sdr from osmocomSDR (http://sdr.osmocom.org/trac/wiki/rtl-sdr) . My USB DVB-T fob is a Sencor SDB522RT , a simple gadget that works well under various operating systems. After plugging-in the USB dongle I started rtl_tcp (with parameter -a and IP address of R_Pi … otherwise rtl_tcp defaults to localhost IP) and fired up SDR# on Windows7 machine. Selecting “RTL-SDR/TCP” as a source and configuring IP address of R_Pi before pressing Play was enough to connect SDR software to remote “converter”. Sample rate of 2048000 samples per second (about 2 MHz “window”) generates about 33 Mbit/s or 4.1 MB/s of network traffic … and this could be used in performance network testing 🙂

Raspberry PI with rtl_tcp feeding data to SDR#

Upper right window is a SSH (terminal) session with R_Pi .