Substation guide

Every chapter of the Substation guide, in reading order, with the first sentence of each.

• What Substation does, and where to start - Substation watches every radio channel in a band at once, and records each transmission it hears to an audio file of its own.
• What a software-defined radio is - By the end of this chapter, you know what a software-defined radio is, and the words radio uses for where a transmission is: its frequency, its band and its radio channel.
• Your first receiver - By the end of this chapter, you know which receiver to start with, where to buy a genuine one, and which antenna to start with.
• Installing Substation - By the end of this chapter, Substation is installed on your computer with the driver your receiver needs, and it can list every band it knows.
• A first scan - By the end of this chapter, Substation has a folder of its own with its settings in it, it has scanned the 2m band, and you have a recording of a transmission it heard, from the air with your receiver or from a test signal without one.
• Straight into Subsample - By the end of this chapter, every transmission Substation records goes straight into Subsample, ready to play, and is there again each time Subsample starts.
• Defined bands, and creating your own - By the end of this chapter, you know which bands Substation defines and which of them it records by default, and your configuration holds a band of your own, which Substation records.
• How Substation hears a transmission - By the end of this chapter, you know what Substation does between the receiver and a recording, and why a transmission turns a radio channel on.
• Recordings of nothing - By the end of this chapter, you know how Substation keeps transmissions and throws noise away, and you can see it doing so in its log.
• Setting up your receiver - By the end of this chapter, your receiver is set for its band: its gain, how many IQ samples it takes a second, and a band that suits each receiver you own.
• What a recording holds - By the end of this chapter, your recordings sit on an audio editor's timeline at the moment each was made, in the format you choose.
• An antenna for your band - By the end of this chapter, you know how long an antenna should be for the band you scan, and what to make it from.
• Substation in your own code - By the end of this chapter, a short program of your own hears each transmission as Substation does, and acts on it.
• Substation with Subsample and Subsequence - By the end of this chapter, every recording Substation keeps arrives in your Subsample library, and every transmission it hears is an event Subsequence can play from.
• Running unattended - By the end of this chapter, Substation scans your band around the clock: started with the computer, started again after a fault, and keeping up with what it hears.