SDRA2021 -13- Bart Somers, PE1RIK: Frequency Band occupancy measurements with statistical analysis

Bart got his HAMradio licence in 1996. A few years ago when cheap SDR-receivers came available on the market he switched from HF to learning SDR and GNUradio. He loves to combine Raspberry pi's, SDR's, antenna's and programming in Python. Currently he is taking his Msc in Computer Science at the University College of Dublin. The goal of Frequency Band Occupancy (FBO) measurements is to investigate and monitor usage of dedicated piece of spectrum, in order to display usage over time. In this talk we present a method for Frequency Band Occupancy measurements and we analyse the results in a statistical way. This makes patterns of usage visible. The key factors in this method are high sensitivity and sort timeframes to trigger on, while still seeing small bandwidth modes. The method presented is usable for small to large frequency bands depending on the SDR used. As an example, the 2 meter HAM-band is monitored using and RTL-SDR with interesting results. The software is created with GNURadio and a new Specmon-block is written for this project. The postprocessing is done with Python and Gnuplot. Camera & Edit: FurStreaming Sebastian Kipp, DL5WN Marc Diensberg, DO1BOL Torben Hellige