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DARPA Funds a $300 Software-Defined Radio For Hackers
Sparrowvsrevolution writes with this story from Forbes: "Over the weekend at the ToorCon hacker conference in San Diego, Michael Ossmann of Great Scott Gadgets revealed a beta version of the HackRF Jawbreaker, the latest model of the wireless Swiss-army knife tools known as 'software-defined radios.' Like any software-defined radio, the HackRF can shift between different frequencies as easily as a computer switches between applications–It can both read and transmit signals from 100 megahertz to 6 gigahertz, intercepting or reproducing frequencies used by everything from FM radios to police communications to garage door openers to WiFi and GSM to next-generation air traffic control system messages. At Ossmann's target price of $300, the versatile, open-source devices would cost less than half as much as currently existing software-defined radios with the same capabilities. And to fund the beta testing phase of HackRF, the Department of Defense research arm known as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) pitched in $200,000 last February as part of its Cyber Fast Track program."
Antenna design for this must be miserable...
Anyone know if there is a good way to have relatively optimized reception over that whole spectrum without having to swap your antennas when changing frequencies?
- Toast
First post?
So, part of me wondered, "Why would they do this when A) there's a growing cheap-SDR market out there and B) it's potentially contrary to US defense interests?"
Then the paranoid responded, "A) If they own it, they can stop it and B) Who says they're not transmitting a serial number with each unit."
Is this really "software-only defined radio"? Doesn't the radio need different hardware for different types of radios? Different antennas for different frequencies (and signal amplitude ranges in those frequencies)? Different analog for RF conditioning and glue from (different) antenna to logic?
Or maybe a single "multi-antenna" with generic RF analog circuits can serve any radio. Isn't that a lot more expensive?
If I want my receiver to do say WiFi right now, but switch to Zigbee later, and to Enocean after, and to Z-Wave later than that, and to 6Lowpan after that, can I start with just HW that does WiFi, and upgrade only SW over the next several years as the protocols are finalized? How about if later I want to switch among those radio types on demand, every few minutes (or milliseconds)?
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make install -not war
I don't have a lot of knowledge in this, but it seems to me that one should be able to crack scrambled comm's much more easy right? ;-)
Eavesdrop on GSM's, listen out on dect-telephones for example? Or 'tinker' with that new 'smart-meter' the neighbours had installed.
Just some suggestions... not saying you should, but you could
Sounds absolutely interesting!
rm -rf --no-preserve-root /
Good. Now we have a backup plan just in case government or industry tries to shut down free communications through the net.
Is there a SDR project for Linux that implements some of the circuits in FPGA?
How about SDR where some of the RF analog is implemented in FPAA (analog array)?
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make install -not war
Software radios are becoming more popular in the amateur radio community. There are several manufacturers of very fine radios and quite a few build-it-yourself radios available too. I'll be watching this with great interest since one of the biggest problems with the lower-cost software radios is band coverage.
As Toast said a moment ago, antenna selection would be hard. Most radio amateurs would use an antenna tuner and/or a multiband antenna for the HF frequencies and an antenna switch for other bands of interest. I do just that. I have a 40 meter full wave horizontal loop antenna and use an antenna tuner and a 4:1 balun and can transmit on all bands from 40m through 10m and have very good results. It's also usable on 6m, but have never had a lot of luck with any kind of distant contacts.
Don't anthropomorphize computers, they don't like it.
Just above the frequencies used by neural interfaces. Keep trying to flood the market with your crap, but we'll stick to the likes of the Phi and see what you fuckers are really doing with those sats.
Here, let me demonstrate the problem with this technology.
Hey! Can anyone here loan me $300? I promise I'll pay you back.
Sadly, the chips used are getting scarce these days so the price of the products (available from your favourite chinese website) is going up. But it still beats $300 by a long, long way.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
It can both read and transmit signals from 100 megahertz to 6 gigahertz
But I guess it will use a hardware mixer to bring these frequencies down to something manageable.
"... 100 megaherz to 6 gigaherz ..." sheesh
quite a few build-it-yourself radios available too
The device announced is basically equivalent in specs to the couple years old UHFSDR (not a terribly creative name) as seen at
http://wb6dhw.com/For_Sale.html#UHFSDR
Main difference is this board has a 8-bit 20 Msps A/D onboard and the UHFSDR has it offboard (assuming you'll use a "16" bit 44+ Ksps soundcard)
You can see quite a difference in implied project design here.... Is it even possible to pass FCC regs for IMD trying to transmit a 8-bit SSB signal, and obviously a audio soundcard doesn't sample wide enough to do wifi or whatever fast digital stuff you'd like. So its broadband digital strong signal type of toy as opposed to something like a UHFSDR which is the opposite.
Can you really shove 20 Msps thru a USB reliably? I used to think no, but...
I'll be watching this with great interest since one of the biggest problems with the lower-cost software radios is band coverage.
I didn't see any switchable bandpass filters, or anything like that. I haven't found a schematic but you can just look at the board and figure out whats going on. It looks like its buildable for on board PCB antenna or external, like solder in the SMA jack OR the 0-ohm jumper at the arrow to connect the pcb antenna. Looks like 2 stages of RF amp MMICs before it hits a mixer. You can see the "I" and "Q" PCB traces in the upper left for both the TX and RX mixer. Apparently the design goals are all half duplex but the actual board design appears to use separate TX and RX stages at the hard/expensive end. Where's the VCOs or more likely DDS synths? I'm guessing on the other side of the board? I bet if I spent more than 5 minutes looking at it, perhaps with the wiki page open and looking at some of the device data sheets while looking at the PCB, I could tell you a lot more about the design.
From looking at the board layout I don't think it's going to work at 6 GHz or at least not work to maximum specs. You can tell the designer came from the "digital camp" into SDR work rather than up from the "analog camp" into SDR work. Little things like how signals are run, some layout choices, some design choices.
For a good time, look at the board picture, which has a URL silkscreened on it, click thru to
https://github.com/mossmann/hackrf/wiki
The "design goals" "hardware components" and "clocking", combined with the PCB, could tell you pretty much everything you need to know about this design.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Uses only 8 bit sampling which will severely limit the dynamic range. You might as well use one of the $30 RTL2832U/E4000 based TV tuners. DARPA throwing them $200,000 for the effort is a WASTE of taxpayer's money for these guys to build a 'TOY' SDR!
One problem as I see it, is that the government is playing Left Hand - Right Hand games. The left hand likes to make these cool cheap toys and give/sell them to get innovation for half the security boys. The right hand is busy saying that anyone who shows learning of any kind not authorized in the manual is a terrorist. "Just think of all the danger of these radios falling into the wrong hands!" They want the end results of cleaned up innovation without the mess of the pioneer-process that produces it.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
for govt spies . quit the bs lies in titles
I would not want it if they were giving it away free, it is junk without HF/Shortwave & SSB
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Ohhh, I want one, where do I buy?
No morse code required for ANY license, including HF privileges.
I don't know that i would say that amateur radio is at the forefront of SDR and DSP, or has ever been. Yes, people holding licenses are doing forefront work, but they're getting paid for it, not doing it as a hobby. Amateur radio triggered some of the very inexpensive SDR approaches out there (SoftRock), but that's nowhere near state of the art in SDR.
And, in terms of software engineering for SDR, I would say that amateur radio, in general, is well behind the rest of the industry. The software for the amateur market leader FlexRadio, is ostensibly open source, but is a huge, undocumented, mass of stuff sort of glued together. GNU radio does only stuff that a PC can handle, and doesn't have very good support for the use of FPGAs, which are almost a necessity for wideband, high performance communications.
But, certainly, hams have a place in the SDR tinkering world.
I wonder if all the wet blankets criticizing this project are going to fess up to being wrong headed in the future when people are doing incredible shit with these radios?
Ettus Research hasn't been doing shit to make the USRP accessible to the rest of us. Personally, I think the majority of the negative reactions are just sour grapes and jealousy because they didn't get a free radio.
DARPA continues to kick ass and lead innovation. Cudos to Mike Ossman!
Now....if we could use that thing as a real time spectrum analyzer, wed be in business.
Until then, SDRs arent that impressive. Ill take my AOR 8200 MK-III and NRD 535D over SDR any day.
Well.. it's understandable that DARPA wants to funds like SDR. It would be good that soldier just carry 1 radio (instead of several like now) in order to connect with their peers/superiors. If you want to talk to terestrial secured phones you need one radio. To talk to HF you need another one. To talk to satellite civilian you need another. Another want if you want to talk to MILSTAR sats. Having 1 radio to do the communication in multi-freq, multi protocols, multi comm-mode (Burst, CW, SSB, FM, AM, ODFM, you name it) would be a welcome changes for the soldier in the fields. And it make a flexible comm system. Where you can change all the above by just downloading a new software for it (instead of changing to another radio). So, yes i understand why DARPA funds this project.
And actually the military circle know this as you can see on one of their offerings:
http://www.spectrumsignal.com/products-services/carriers-modules/fn-rf-boards/rf-4902/
(Yes, it can be used for communication, eavesdropping & jamming. depend on what you want it to do. It can even stored to hardisk the portion of received band of your choice for later "decryption" by your software)
SDR has been with us for sometimes. The phone that can change protocols from GSM to GPRS, EDGE, 3G, CDMA, EVDO, LTE are in fact processed in the same baseband processor. That's why you sometimes had update for your Radio firmware for your baseband-RF processor.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altair_Semiconductor#Products
wwwen.zte.com.cn/en/solutions/wireless/gsm_umts/201103/t20110314_224013.html
Amateur Radio have for sometimes enjoyed this SDR radio:
www.flex-radio.com
microtelecom.it/perseus/
Even this "cheap" China-made CB-radio is already using SDR for its modulation generation.
cbradiomagazine.com/Radio%20Reviews/Alpha%20Max%2010%20AM-1000/Alpha%2010%20Max%20AM-1000%2010%20Meter%20CB%20Radio%20Review.htm
A good SDR radio can have a high dynamic-range and intercept-point that rival its normal (complicated, multi conversion radio).
www.sherweng.com/table.html
However as you can see also, the price is way above reach for most "down to earth" amateurs. So I would welcome this research that can make the price go down. A US$ 300,- for a complete Amateur Transceiver (be it UHF/VHF combo or even better to include the HF portion of the bands that would be very nice). I definitely would buy one.
Most SDRs use commonly available 192KHz/24bit ADCs and DACs these days which work fairly well (thanks to heavy commercialization of home theatre gear, these parts are cheap, common and work REALLY well).
Most SDRs are using I/Q encoding and decoding and then mxiing to bring the signal up to the desired frequency band. I say most because there are a few "direct conversion" SDRs that take an antenna input, broadband amplify it, and stick it into a ADC - you can get 250Msps 8/10/12/14/16 bit ADCs these days (thanks to Nyquist, that's DC to 125MHz or so). A bit pricey (you're looking at a couple hundred dollars per chip, in 1000 quantities), but doable. Of course, you'll need to find a way to offload that data or reduce it.
Depends on the bit-depth, but for USB 20-40MB/sec (160-320Mbps or 8/16 bit) is acheivable on most PCs. Though the problem is less USB bandwdith and more the lack of isochronous bandwidth. If you want to do this reliably, you need FireWire at a minimum (which even though is only 400Mbps, it can achieve those rates quite readily) or faster interface.
All you need is (besides one of these) is a 100MHz IF oscillator and a mixer and you can get HF too! Then you could go from DC to 6 GHz! A 100MHz IF oscillator is basically a 100MHz crystal (about $2.50-$5.99) and a 1 Hz - 200MHz transistor (the guts of the mixer) ranges from $0.010 - $0.10 in lots of 10. Of course there is more than just that, eg: varicap diodes that let you adjust for 1:1 SWR for the tank circuit. But they don't cost much either. Oh and a long wire antenna.
That's an interesting range... but there isn't a huge amount of stuff up top, and you can buy an SDR for $100 or less that'll give you coverage from 50 mhz to about 2 GHz, if 2 GHz-plus hasn't got something of particular interest to you. The funcube dongle is one; there are others.
And if you're into ham radio, particularly the HF bands, and willing to build, take a look into the softrock.
Me, I use a Funcube for 50 mhz to 2 GHz, and an RFSPACE SDR-IQ, which is a high performance (almost)DC-to-30 MHz SDR that is a great deal of fun for me, as I'm both a ham radio op and a shortwave listener.
I use this as my operating software.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
What was written under the blacked out mark?
The next mayor improvement would be if that device was syncable . That way you could set up multiple devices and do MIMO. That's just a tiny thing, but could make a huge difference.
Also ditch that USB port. If you have ever used an USRP you can see that it's mayor flaw is the USB port which is just to slow and unreliable to do anything useful with it. Use Ethernet.