HOWTO: Use the RTL-SDR v3 dongle in Ubuntu for AM/FM radio and ADS-B using only repository software

Commands used listed in this video description below.... The RTL2832U chip in the V3 dongle is designed for DVB-T (European digital TV standard) and not for the ATSC standard used in North America While these dongles are excellent for general-purpose software-defined radio, they lack the necessary bandwidth to capture the 6 MHz ATSC channel width, as they are limited to approximately 2.4–2.8 MHz of bandwidth. If you want to go more in depth and download / install some more software, I highly recommend the "Intercept" package which makes it relatively easy to switch between a LOT of cool things to receive: https://github.com/smittix/intercept Commands I used for the software setup on Ubuntu / Lubuntu in this video: sudo apt install rtl-sdr sudo apt install gqrx-sdr gqrx - is a general purpose SDL radio spectrum viewer / decoder To blacklist the default RTL Digital TV module so our software (rtl-sdr, gqrx, dump1090) can use it: cd /etc/modprobe.d create a file (name is not important, but using the module name is nice) You can use any text editor (I used vi, but pico is easier to use) sudo pico blacklist-dvb_usb_rtl28xxu.conf inside the file you must have one line: blacklist dvb_usb_rtl28xxu Alternatively, you can create the file and add the line all with a single long command line: echo 'blacklist dvb_usb_rtl28xxu' | sudo tee --append /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-dvb_usb_rtl28xxu.conf Then reboot your computer to make the blacklist take effect. I use the command tail -f /var/log/syslog to review the syslog messages when I plug in a new device. You can use the gqrx program to listen to FM radio broadcasts and see a waterfall of what transmissions exist in you area. To hear shortwave or AM stations, you need to use direct sampling. In GQRX go to Files, IO Devices, and set the command line from rtl=0 to rtl=0,direct_samp=2 To watch airplanes fly around, you need the dump1090 package: sudo snap install dump1090-carroarmeto0 To allow this snap to connect to the USB rtl-sdl dongle you need to: sudo snap connect dump1090-carroarmato0:raw-usb to start the process that reads the 1.09Ghz signals and exports the data, run this command: dump1090-carroarmato0.dump1090 Let the above command run, open a new terminal window, and start up the webserver (which uses the data from the dump1090 program): dump1090-carroarmato0.webserver 8881 Open a web browser and navigate to the webserver running on local port 8881: http://127.0.0.1:8881