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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?
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
Who says they're not transmitting a serial number with each unit.
That would be very hard to hide from anyone with a even just a little test equipment. SDRs typically operate by taking user-generated in-phase and quadrature (I/Q) signals from the data source. These have the desired data waveform already encoded in them. Additional modulation (to sneak in a serial number) would appear as undesired spurs or noise.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
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.
I don't know why DARPA would necessarily feel the need to contribute to work in an area that is already receiving attention(The guys at Ettus will sell you a competent little package for under $2k, sometimes rather far under, depending on the frequency ranges you want, which is hardly free; but isn't exactly "If you have to ask, you may be in the wrong store." money); but I'd imagine that whatever sub-unit of DARPA made the decision is the sub-unit where people who realize that 'obscurity' ain't gonna cut it as a security strategy in the future hang out.
While, yes, the US Intelligence Community certainly wet-dreams about a world of full spectrum dominance and Total Information Awareness, anyone who hasn't fully removed themselves from empiricism has to admit that that isn't really on the table. Especially for assorted hacker shenanigans, there are just too many parties who can drum up enough nerds to at least go after soft targets.
In such an environment, the US(as a country deeply dependent on complex electronic infrastructure) is probably better off if friendly security researchers have cheap toys to work with, at the risk that enemy ones will as well, rather than a situation where friendly security researchers find that the tools they need are expensive or illicit; but anybody doing work for even fairly cruddy little nation-states has what they need to pump out the zero-days.
most people who are likely to use this will be transmitting their call sign every time they broadcast. Letting Joe or Jane Average play with one of these will be like putting a green laser in the hands of every 6th graders hands.
Don't anthropomorphize computers, they don't like it.
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
I wasn't commenting on the chaos that would ensue if these were widely available to every wannabe pirate radio hax0r or anarchist. I agree that would be a CB-esque mess. I was commenting on how hard it would be for 'Big Brother' to embed a hidden serial number in the transmitted waveform to track users for their own governmental nefarious purposes. Anyone with a pair of these could easily see the secret modulation.
most people who are likely to use this will be transmitting their call sign every time they broadcast.
If by 'most people' you mean amateur radio operators, then I heartily agree (although we are not allowed to 'broadcast' in the common definition of the word).
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
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
where people who realize that 'obscurity' ain't gonna cut it as a security strategy
They made certain RF / DSP / digital design decisions that provide a rather hard constraint. If they can flood the market using govt money, no one out there will have gear with IMD performance better than 8 bit, sample rates higher than 20 Msps, the RF chain probably means miserable performance both at very weak signals and very strong, and board PCB routing probably means some interesting (intentional?) RF birdies both in RX and more importantly in TX.
So... once you've put non .mil research into a carefully specified box, you can quite easily do your real .mil work outside the carefully specified box. Use a modulation that has to sample 100 MHz of spectrum to demodulate. Who knows.
Its an effort to stop market convergence, to drive them apart / separate more so than to open up an already thriving open environment.
"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
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
Anyone with a pair of these could easily see the secret modulation.
If you're paranoid you'd say anyone with a suitable trusted 3rd party receiver would see the modulation. Because if they do it right the receiver won't show you the secret modulation. ;)
Seriously though I'm sure the much sneakier bunch can figure out ways to fingerprint stuff that are hard to detect. You don't need to send out the identifier at a high rate. If it's a bit a minute who will notice?
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.
Well, in a simple minded way I can see an obvious answer. If, by pushing a little innovation, they can reduce the cost from $2k to $300, that's a 6x reduction in cost. When multiplied by, oh, the entire U.S. military population, that becomes a substantial dollar amount.
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.
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.
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.
I recently heard that DARPA projects don't necessarily need to be military related, and that research in the US is traditionally heavily sponsored by the military. In this contract I suspect the goal is not to make some military application, but to get more people interested in SDR and DSP. There might be some shortage in knowledgeable people in this field.
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
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.