Still nothing, with rtl-433 receiving the same sensors on the same aerial from
a different receiver. That settles where the fault is not: not the aerial,
not the sensors, not the band. So the sensible thing is to stop differing
from the configuration known to work on that aerial, and this differed from it
in three ways, every one of them mine.
It tuned a quarter of a megahertz to one side of 433.92 and shifted the signal
back in software, to keep the receiver's own spike off a signal that works by
being switched off. That is a real effect and avoiding it this way is a bad
trade: at the sample rate this ran at, the shift is followed by a filter, and
a filter narrow enough to reject the spike is narrow enough to lose a
transmitter that has drifted -- or to lose the signal outright if a dongle
presents its samples the other way round, which is not a thing to depend on.
The spike is a steady addition to the envelope and a burst rises clear of it.
Tuning straight at the sensors now, which is what the established tools do.
It sampled at a megasample a second where a quarter of one is plenty: the
shortest pulse these send is two hundred microseconds, which is fifty samples
at the lowest rate a dongle will do. The extra rate bought nothing but the
room for that filter to exist in. At 250 kS/s nothing after the mixer is
narrower than the band, so the offset now does nothing at all whatever it is
set to, and says so.
And it turned on the RTL2832's digital gain control along with the tuner's.
The two pump: the gain winds up through the silence between one burst and the
next, lifting the noise towards the signal and squeezing the very difference
the burst detector works on. It matters here in a way it does not for
aircraft, where a frame is found by correlating a preamble over microseconds
rather than by comparing a burst with the quiet around it.
Three more faults found while going over the rest of it, all the same mistake
in different clothes -- treating the middle of a distribution as though it
were the quiet part of one.
The check that skips an empty block measured the peak against the median. A
recording that is mostly burst measures its own burst against its own burst,
finds no difference and is discarded as silence, which is what happened to
every short capture. The gate's scatter had the same trouble one level down
and could come out above the peak, which is the one setting that cannot be
right, so it is now capped below it.
And the rule deciding where one message ends keyed on the middle gap in a
burst. Where a one is drawn as a gap three times a zero and most of the bits
are zeroes, the middle gap is the short one, twice it still falls inside the
message, and every one-bit ended a burst -- the message coming apart into
pieces of three pulses. It keys on the widest gap now, which is a fact about
the message rather than about the data it happened to carry.
The pieces of a message are also put back together after being sliced rather
than before. Grouping has to be tight, because the group is what fixes the
threshold and a group holding two sensors of unequal strength fixes it on the
louder; but the gaps inside one message run from two hundred microseconds on
the newer sensors to four thousand on the oldest, and a grouping tight enough
for the first tears the second into a bit at a time. So each piece is
measured at its own amplitude and joined to its neighbours afterwards, and
anything that comes out longer than the longest message there is gets cut at
its largest gaps.
Measured rather than argued: across four hundred and eighty combinations of
pulse and gap timing, 464 now read where 417 did; across twenty-one gap-keyed
combinations, 18 where 12 did; and eighty seconds of receiver noise still
yields nothing at all.
--from-iq FILE reads a saved capture instead of the receiver, so a recording
made where the aerial is can be worked on anywhere, as many times as it takes.
Everything downstream of the dongle is the real thing, which is what tells a
receiver problem and a decoder problem apart. --save-iq writes the settings
beside the samples, a file of raw samples with no record of its rate being
unreadable by anything. The invented garden now waits like a dongle instead
of running as fast as the machine allows, which it should have done from the
start: --seconds meant nothing against it and a capture came out fifty times
too large.
Full suite 2331 passed; this work checked against sixteen deliberately broken
builds, two of which it survived until the tests were made to catch them, and
one change was removed for being unable to earn a test at all. Built as
2026-09-07_03.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016PsWPTweCT6pwxKngvVxcg
706c632f47