This same devloper also built an SDR out of an ESP32 Wi-Fi microcontroller [1], this is awesome!<p>This development makes me hope that we'd be seeing more of these on common Wi-Fi cards, so that every random laptop could be used as an SDR for many fun and useful applications on a budget.<p><a href="https://github.com/h0m3us3r/eSpDR" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/h0m3us3r/eSpDR</a>
"Damn, I forgot the garage code"<p>"oh, no problem"<p>>tippy tappy<p>>brrrrrrr
It’d be neat to see this on ESP32-C5, which also has a 5GHz radio. S3 is 2.4 only.
I was really excited about this, but as an average home assistant user couldn't really see an application, lol.
FYI, since it's the same chipset I'm pretty certain this will work on the Banana Pi R4, which has built in PCIe for NVMe.
Having done repairs on a ton of older service monitors, and having my hand in SDR, this is amazing! There's a huge amount of machining and hardware to make a service monitor, but with desktop CNC, cheap PCBS, and jelly bean components that go into the 10s of GHz, the sky's the limit.<p>I'd add a heat sunk 100 watt DC-5Ghz 20dB fixed attenuator, 0-110 dB switched attenuator, 5 ghz low pass filter, 7-12 Ghz local oscillator/mixer up/down converter, and it would make a small, very high performance service monitor good to 5 Ghz. 8)
Service monitor?
A Communications service monitor is a tool for servicing radios. Until recently, most large organizations used VHF/UHF FM radio for communications on dedicated channels. A service monitor is a tool that can usually absorb the full output power of these radios while measuring power, frequency, distortion, etc. They can also generate a variety of signals for aligning receivers.<p>Most of the older, affordable models go from almost DC to 1 Ghz. I've got an IFR 2947a, which goes up to 1.05 Ghz.<p>Here's an example from ebay.<p><a href="https://www.ebay.com/itm/168770412399" rel="nofollow">https://www.ebay.com/itm/168770412399</a><p>Here's a specification sheet for the one I have, a pdf<p><a href="https://www.testmart.com/webdata/mfr_pdfs/aerofl/2947a.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.testmart.com/webdata/mfr_pdfs/aerofl/2947a.pdf</a>
Why 4ghz?
I've edited it, but generally you don't want to have problems with mirror images getting through and creating spurious responses. Real world RF filters don't have infinitely steep edges, so initially I figured a 4 Ghz low pass filter would have enough loss by 5 Ghz to get the job done. I revised to to a 5 Ghz low filter, and a 7-12 Ghz Local Oscillator to give the filter an easier job. Also, the lower the swing in percentage terms for a VCO, the easier it is to work with.<p>So the signal path in receive mode would be:<p>N connector / 20 dB 100 watt pad / Switched attenuator / Low pass filter / Front End diodes / Mixer / Router board for DSP<p>Alternatively, there's usually a second path that skips the attenuator, with a lower maximum power level.<p>The reverse path would work for generating signals from DC (almost) to 5 Ghz.
Wow that's super cool! It's not DC to daylight but I sure don't know a cheaper way to get a 320 Msps receiver at 5 GHz.
Is this kind of thing why samsung asks you to sign a contract before letting third parties use the FM radios on their phones? Because many phone radios nowadays are software defined?
What do normal people use SDRs for? I'm genuinely curious. Or is it just cool to do?
Many consumer temperature, humidity, rain, and wind sensors use simple radio protocols in the 433 MHz band to report their readings back to their indoor display unit.<p>Stick an RTL-SDR dongle on your computer and use the program rtl_433 to monitor that traffic. It comes with built-in decoders for the protocols for a very large number of those sensors.<p>I've got such a setup and I can see not only my one sensors (An AcuRite outdoor thermometer, and the two sensors from an AcuRite fridge/freeze thermometer) but also a few neighbor's temperature sensors, humidity sensors, soil moisture sensors, wind speed and direction sensors, rain gauges, and their tire pressure.<p>You can set up MQTT and have rtl_433 report the data that way, and you can have Home Assistant get that and display it. It knows how to handle a variety of sensor types.<p>I haven't done that yet. I just have rtl_433 log everything by appending JSON records to a file. A script reads that, finds the sensors I care about, and stores their data in an sqlite database.
At the moment I have 5x RTL-SDR dongles streaming into a box on different bands (137, 433, 912, 978, and 1090 MHz). They pick up all kinds of things, from local weather stations to the water meter for my condo to ADS-B/UAT transmissions from local aircraft. I even see the tire pressure monitor signals from cars that drive by (some of you guys need to add air!).<p>Mostly it's just fun. I like peeking at all the ambient transmissions in the area.<p>A while back I was more deeply involved in the SDR space and even reverse-engineered some pager signals. At least a few years ago, pagers were still widely used in hospitals (totally in plaintext, by the way).
I am learning about radio and modulation using SDR (with professor Claude - incredible for learning! Especially if you know exactly what you want to learn and have a strong enough background in somewhat related fields - audio and image DSP for me - to make exercises it writes for me short, relatable, and yet illuminating) and our second lesson after cheap 433 remotes was FLEX and pagers - plenty of that stuff in the city, with about half messages from a hospital a few blocks away. Still very widely used in the US (I live in NYC).
Seeing what gets broadcasted there 100% unencrypted was quite a shock. Patient names, ages, and conditions; doctor names, rooms, departments, requests for medications and assistance... Insane amount of super private PII.
off-topic, but "with professor Claude - incredible for learning! Especially if you know exactly what you want to learn "<p>This always strikes me in the "oh no look at all the cheating!" anti-ai takes.<p>Like, the cheating only blew up because there was/is the gap in teacher/professor/moderator understanding of the tools. Kids were copying wikipedia back in the day, and if the kid had a decent vocab, went completely undetected for a time. Then everyone thought they could do it and scorers got suspiscious enough to create a demand for an "is this wikipedia" software such that companies made them and scorers implemented them. We even saw reversions to written exams, and have had continuous use of written exams in 'critical' tests like SAT et al.<p>And of course, the only reason that the teacher's ensure that the students aren't cheating is because they know the students are heading for tests they can't cheat. So, there's new cheating, there will need to be new detection.<p>A motivated learner today has unprecedented capabilites compared to a motivated learner of even 10 years ago.<p>Assuming, of course, that the learner is practicing universally accepted study/research methods such as never implicitly trusting single sources, especially when they're third hand summaries of unverified sources.<p>I've had proffesors give me incorrect information with every bit of certainty an LLM offers, but it wouldn't be their fault if I just nodded along with either of them.
It is cool to do. But there are professional uses for it, particularly like finding interference or noise. You can ask things like: "How crowded is my 2.4 GHz spectrum?"<p>The RTL SDR is the gateway drug into SDR's. The bandwidth is limited, so don't expect to be capturing HDTV Streams. But it's certainly possible to listen to AM/FM, Ham Bands, VHF/UHF signals, etc.<p>If you don't want to buy an RTL-SDR, you can search KiwiSDR which is a streaming SDR for frequencies under 30MHz. You can also connect to KiwiSDR's worldwide.<p>Then if you get the itch, you can go get your a HackRF, a ham license, or whatever else scratches it.
I've used it to identify transmissions in my neighborhood in the public (ISM) band, listen to various radio broadcasts outside the normal AM/FM, and best of all, track all the planes in my area (ADS-B).
Satdump group uses them receiving all kind of weather satellites. They are mastering S-/X-Band stuff for ages already.<p>Ham radio operators looking forward using them for 13cm and 5cm band stuff.
Thanks claude
Yeah, reading stuff like:<p>"BRINGUP, from a cold radio: what MediaTek's ROM patch does at download (XO, pin mux, the CONN AFE calibration pulse per band, the A-die TOP init by chip ID, pads and CONN switch, the A-dies' eFuse trims); the UMAC pool layout; the common and per-band PHY initialisation; on each A-die the RF init tables, the resistor calibration and the RC filter calibration; the FEM outputs and the crystal trim."<p>That's not even some other language poorly translated to English, that's just a bunch of words.<p>Between stuff like this and math "proofs" that aren't readable either I'm really challenged to see the benefit here.<p>What I get out of this is that one could, if you had the documentation, write a more generalized SDR application for this hardware than the Wifi7 application. That an LLM model can provoke this behavior seems as a good existence proof perhaps?
> That's not even some other language poorly translated to English, that's just a bunch of words.<p>The language makes sense if you've worked with radio chips or firmware.<p>Terms like XO (crystal oscillator) and pin mux (chip pin multiplexer, basically assigning pins to their role) are common for embedded work, not just radio work.<p>Usually in a project you get that language hidden in a separate implementation doc where casual readers won't get confused by it.
> I'm really challenged to see the benefit here.<p>> write a more generalized SDR application for this hardware<p>Yeahhh, no. Sorry but the entry barrier is now extremely lowered, especially in effort.<p>~20 years ago this would have been literally sci-fi. Back then just getting an USRP to work with gnu-radio, then finding the proper hardware external clock, then doing lots of work on reading / trying stuff / writing scripts etc. took a ton of effort and time. Having the ability to throw tokens at it and have at least a starting point is amazing, IMO.
Is what it feels like to talk to a superhuman intelligence?
I'm doubtful about that. To be pedantic if you consider the set 'superhuman intelligence' to be a proper superset of 'human intelligence', then I would expect it to be able to structure its communications to the level the audience could understand. Does that make sense?<p>Is is more what it feels like talking to someone who doesn't really understand what it is they are talking about. A lot of keywords but no flow, no conceptual linkages from one part to another. Etc.
If someone wants to set up some hardware in a harness and then spend their tokens reverse engineering it, I'm thankful for the publication.<p>A year ago it was different. I looked at a lot of these vibe-RE projects and a lot of them wouldn't even do what they claimed. Now if someone points a frontier model at some code and lets it consume tokens for a few days, the output is often valuable as a starting point for other projects.
Try using GPT to write software like this, I don't think just anyone could do it unless they know the problem domain well. Understanding something is not something any AI can replace (yet).
Claude or not: It's a huge breakthrough for ham radio and signal analysis.<p>We now can programm more manual tuned stuff to turn this into a full 13cm and 5cm radio as it was proven to work.<p>Before the esp-sdr hack and this one both bands were quite difficult and pricey to reach.
I can't keep up with the rapid, non stop cool stuff being discovered! Someone figured out how to get the ESP32 to transmit, at lower bandwidth (I think I read 200-250khz) I don't know which project it was but there are a bunch on this site:<p><a href="https://www.rtl-sdr.com/esp32-sdr-turbo-mode-throughput-improvement-real-i-q-output/" rel="nofollow">https://www.rtl-sdr.com/esp32-sdr-turbo-mode-throughput-impr...</a>
Holy cow... I've got to limit my projects, so I don't repeat history where I kept finding radio shack bags full of parts for ideas. But you can get 3 of those, with external antennas for less than $60 through amazon. I put it in my wish list instead of buying them now. I've got a data diode to finish first.<p>Sideband on 13 CM sounds like an amazing thing to pull off.
What is the radio quality like SNR?
$80 here? <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DR7KMNC4" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DR7KMNC4</a><p>That's quite a good deal...
wow, could this be turned into a 2.4ghz SAR? I always wondered if it’d be possible to use something like that to pick up wifi signals from much farther away. Of course a more sensible choice would just be to use a yagi antenna
An accurate description is "turn an SDR into an SDR".
Anyone know how to get ahold of a device in Europe?
Super awesome.<p>Not the point but the Airhona could here is really neat. AN7581 with typical quad Cortex-A53 but then 8x RISC-V network coprocessors. Good luck figuring out how to use that though, whew! (Go Astra go.)
<a href="https://www.airoha.com/products/p/NpfqGLnZiZuYUZ6N" rel="nofollow">https://www.airoha.com/products/p/NpfqGLnZiZuYUZ6N</a><p>I've been thinking how beautiful and awesome it is that SDR finally has a real jump. The QuadRF using the rpi's mipi connector was such a glorious hack! Custom ADC from parts. 80MSps. <a href="https://www.crowdsupply.com/scale-rf/quadrf" rel="nofollow">https://www.crowdsupply.com/scale-rf/quadrf</a><p>And man what a huge flying leap forward here. 320MSps! Much deeper 14b IQ precision vs 8b. The totally custom mediatek radio firmware is <i>incredible</i>. Such incredible possibility. Maybe someday the mimo can be useful for some of the same neat AoE / beam forming capabilities?
Am I understanding that this is doing something the chipset wasn’t designed to do?<p>I’m not seeing a synopsis of the significance of this, for the uninitiated<p>What is Msps? I’m not familiar with that scale
> Am I understanding that this is doing something the chipset wasn’t designed to do?<p>Every WiFi modem has a testmode. It's required to verify the TX/RX chain during manufacturing and for compliance testing.<p>Seemingly you can read out the entire spectrum at full rate.
mega samples per second. IOW: sample rate.<p>The significance is that most off the shelf SDR platforms have much lower specs. Almost all of them use the same Analog Devices transceiver chip.
Msps = Mega samples per second
Now if you could also make it transmit such samples a few of those could make a nice DIY phase array for some of the most fun bands to play with.