I am always awestruck at the amount of invisible EM waves whipping around us at the speed of light. Gigabits of information are bombarding us every second via these waves. A lot of it is critical information like the ILS that guides planes when landing or the TV station that broadcasts the Bears game. Some of it comes from the ground - FM radio, TV, and cellular. Some of it comes from 13,000 miles away in space from things like GPS.
While flying to Chicago I decided to check out what the radio spectrum looks like 2,000ft above Chicagoland. Using my trusty
RTL-SDR and a rather lackluster antenna I was able to capture some spectrum plots amidst two skeptical row-mates who were baffled by the weirdo next to them.
It's always fascinating to be able to visualize these invisible sources of information and entertainment. Below are three captures at different frequency bands.
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| A Lot of HDTV Stations |
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| More HDTV Stations and the 700MHz Cell Band - 4G LTE anyone? |
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| 850MHz Cellular |
For my own future reference and for anyone who cares to read this, below is a link to the US frequency allocations. It really is crowded!
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