RF Health Check @ Home

21 Dec 2025 · RF Health, Dashboard

I like tinkering with stuff. This is the output from a HackRF One running a sweep from 1MHz to 6GHz and noting down the noise level in each of the amateur bands (HF, VHF, UHF, L Band, S Band & C Band to 6GHz) then displaying the results.

There's a public dashboard which shows high level data then locked away behind a passwordless.dev passkey login is a for my eyes only dashboard with much more detail. I don't suppose there's any need for it to be locked away, but as I said on the first page, this whole site is about me experimenting with a website!

My HackRF has a portapack attached to it so to work you have to set it to run as a standard HackRF in the menu. It does a frequency sweep, then writes the data to a file on my NAS. The page then queries this file and fills itself in with the numbers. It then based on thresholds I've arbitrarily set gives an RF Health assessment of either Good, Fair or Noisy. It colour codes the results.

On the secured page I compare the results to the last set of results and if there's anything interesting I zoom in on the signal and then sample it with an Airspy Mini SDR, capturing waterfall images of the signal and a power spectral density view. It lets me quickly look at the captured screens and decide if it's just the regular high noise floor or something weird/interesting. This all happens automatically. The devices are plugged into my PC and triggered using powershell scripts, then uploaded to the website.

I use the Airspy for 'zooming in', it's got a higher dynamic range than the RTL-SDRs and it's better at differentiating weak signals close to strong signals. It'll also do 6MHz of bandwidth so I get more spectrum in the captures.

Zoomed In — Zoomed in Spectrum from the Airspy Mini.

I'm happy that it's all working (until I get another smart arse idea and break it!). Next job it to swap the Airspy antenna for a more local one, it's currently hooked up to the 2/70 white stick on my roof, I'm going to make a couple of little 1/4 wave ground planes for suspect bands. That'll be a job for the new year now.

If you want to look at the public dashboard the link is here.