The things you hear when you least expect it.
About this episode
The episode discusses the integration of Home Assistant with RTL-SDR to explore ISM bands and various devices that use these frequencies.
Foundations of Amateur Radio The other day a friend of mine mentioned in passing that they'd hooked their Home Assistant dashboard to an RTL-SDR dongle to listen to the various ISM bands. If that sounds like gibberish, let me elaborate. "Home Assistant" is a tool that, among other things, allows you to control devices throughout your house, think lights, vacuum cleaner, air conditioning, and power sockets. It turns out that there are various plug-ins that allow you to connect it to a tool called "rtl_433", more on that in a moment. ISM, or Industrial Scientific and Medical, is a global collection of 13 radio bands, regulated by the ITU, the International Telecommunications Union, where devices are permitted to transmit all different types of signals, think microwave ovens, NFC, or Near Field Communications, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, but also weather stations, security devices, battery monitors, tyre pressure monitors, remote keyless entry, garage door openers and plenty more. The most "well known" ISM band is 433 MHz, but the most used ones are those we think of as Wi-Fi bands, 2.4 and 5.8 GHz. It sometimes comes as a surprise that Bluetooth and Wi-Fi share the same frequencies with each…
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