This post is of interest to ham radio operators, and also anyone who wishes to monitor NOAA weather radio, police, fire, EMS, aircraft, marine, and other radio traffic using a $15 receiver plugged into your laptop. The Chinese USB "dongles", originally intended to receive the Far East mobile television service, are being re-purposed as VHF/UHF receivers for many different modulation schemes and protocols. The software to re-purpose them runs either on a PC (Win/Mac/Linux), or on a single-board computer like a Raspberry PI (Raspian Linux). At about US$15, Ol' Backwoods just had to have one. The RTL-SDR receives on...