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DARPA Funds a $300 Software-Defined Radio For Hackers

Posted by timothy on from the turn-on-tune-in dept.

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."

4 of 94 comments (clear)

  1. Antennas by burning-toast · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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?

    1. Re:Antennas by Muad'Dave · · Score: 5, Informative

      Log periodic or discone.

      --
      Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
    2. Re:Antennas by burning-toast · · Score: 5, Informative

      I appreciate that. I might be heavily vested into computers, but radio isn't something I have had the pleasure to tinker with too much.

      Also, found the repo / blog for that board (article was lacking in details):

      http://www.greatscottgadgets.com/hackrf/

      https://github.com/mossmann/hackrf

      - Toast

  2. Re:Different HW Needed? by Muad'Dave · · Score: 5, Informative

    If you have SDR equipment that can operate on 2.4GHz and has enough bandwidth, you could operate WiFi, ZigBee, and other protocols at the same time. You could have WiFi on channel 1, ZigBee on 11, etc. As long as the chipping codes don't collide, you can go nuts. As an example of relatively simple SDRs, check out these Web SDRs. These are single radios that digitize large swaths of spectrum. Each web user gets their own software virtual receiver that is tunable across the sampled spectrum. These radios can support hundreds of users at the same time, each listening to different freqs in different modes.

    The radio hardware remains the same. The parts that can change are external to the actual 'radio' part - preselector filters, preamps, antennas, etc. Once you get the signal of interest to the radio, the processing is identical. Look around for descriptions of I/Q modulation - by supplying in-phase and quadrature signals, you can generate any modulation you want.

    --
    Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.