WhispPi: White space monitoring with Raspberry Pi

Recently a lot of attention has been given to the use of TV White Spaces for rural communications. Several monitoring campaigns have been carried out to measure spectrum occupancy worldwide, concluding that most of the spectrum is underutilized. In this paper we present the design and implementation of a low cost system to measure spectrum occupancy and to geo-tag the measurements to allow mobile measurement campaigns. The system is based on the Raspberry Pi system on chip and on an affordable spectrum analyser. After calibrating the system against a professional spectrum analyser, we measured the spectrum occupancy in urban and rural Venezuela, showing that there is plenty of vacant UHF TV spectrum.