Category Archives: RF

DCC 2011: FUNCube project development

The FUNcube Dongle is a SDR receiver on a USB dongle which currently sells for $125 GPB. It uses the same E4000 tuner found in the $20 RTL-SDR dongle we’ve posted about previously. The developer is Howard Long, G6VLB, who chronicled the FUNCube’s development in the above video from the 2011 Digital Communications Conference hosted […]

RTL-SDR APCO Project 25 (P25) receiver

Balint Seeber has done it again! In this video he shows how to take the RTL-SDR dongle and use it in conjunction with the open source OP25 project to successfully demodulate APCO Project 25 (P25) digital radio voice communications. P25 is a term used to refer to a modulation system used by many public safety […]

Cheap AFSK terminal node controller

Robots shared his cheap AFSK terminal node controller design. It’s a cheap alternative to the commercial TNCs, based on a STM32VL discovery board and a small adapter board. Audio Frequency Shift Keying is an old, low speed packed based radio standard, now primarily used in HAM radios for APRS communication. What is needed for APRS […]

Introducing RTL-SDR: a $20 SDR

If you don’t want to spend $1,200+ for a USRP SDR to use GNU Radio the crew at OsmoSDR want to help. In addition to their other amazing work, Osmocom team members (notably Steve Markgraf) have been hacking away on an alternative least-cost solution they call rtl-sdr. So what is rtl-sdr? It is a creative […]

Chronos hacking update

JP Norair has been hacking away with the TI 433 MHz Chronos. My project is OpenTag, which is a 433 MHz centric IoT/M2M stack. It’s 433-centric because it implements DASH7 and because it makes design assumptions that multihop is not of great importance (at 433 MHz, it certainly isn’t). You can check the wiki, which […]

2011 DCC: Bluetooth for microcontrollers

This talk from the 2011 DCC conference held in Baltimore, MD, last September, covers the basics of using Bluetooth in microcontroller circuits. The presenter is John A. Hansen, amateur radio licensee W2FS, and is the developer of commercial amateur radio digital products with his TNC-X company. If nothing else, you’ll find out how Bluetooth got […]

2011 DCC – Practical Software Radio

This talk is from the 2011 Digital Communications Conference (DCC) held last September in Baltimore, MD. The speaker is Matt Ettus who heads up Ettus Research, manufacturers of the USRP family of SDRs. His talk is an in depth technical explanation of “Why Things Don’t Always Match the Textbooks” in SDR. Matt is affiliated with […]

Wardriving for ZigBee

Travis Goodspeed has assembled this wardriving project covering the ZigBee wireless protocol. It is designed around the radio module from the TelosB, which is used to sniff for nearby ZigBee/802.15.4 transmissions. This module is connected via serial to a Roving Networks RN42 module which provides a Bluetooth connection to the Nokia N9. Travis’ GoodFET firmware […]

TI’s CC110L RF Module BoosterPack

asdf informs us that TI has the CC110L RF Module BoosterPack now in stock and available for $19. According to TI: The CC110L RF BoosterPack is a low-power wireless transceiver extension kit for use with the Texas Instruments MSP-EXP430G2 LaunchPad development kit. Based on the CC110L device, the on-board Anaren Integrated Radio (AIR) A110LR09A radio […]

28C3: Soundcard based radio direction finding

In this lightning talk presentation from the 28C3 conference, the zunkworks crew outlines their work using simple RF hardware and a Linux laptop with soundcard to experiment with Radio Direction Finding (RDF). RDF has long been used in commercial and public safety activites, and the approach employed here attempts to bring RDF development down to […]

28C3: Reverse engineering a Qualcomm baseband

At the recently concluded Chaos Communication Congress 28C3 “behind enemy lines” conference in Berlin, Germany, Guillaume Delugré presented this talk on reverse-engineering a Qualcomm baseband. Despite their wide presence in our lives, baseband chips are still nowadays poorly known and understood from a system point of view. Some presentations have highlighted vulnerabilities in GSM stacks […]

30-Meter Amateur Radio beacon using Parallax Propeller

Eldon Brown, WA0UWH, has been experimenting with a Parallax Propeller he received for Christmas. Being an avid amateur radio operator, Eldon decided to code up a low power radio beacon on the 30-Meter amateur radio band (10.10 to 10.15 MHz.) He wrote this simple program to generate very slow speed CW (Morse code) radio transmissions […]

NBW-SDR: NBitWonder software defined radio

NBitWonder writes: Over at NBitWonder, we have been working to develop a software-defined radio for a few months. Last weekend, the radio received its very first signals. There is a short writeup and demonstration video at our website. This is quite similar to Jeri Ellsworth’s design in that is uses a Tayloe detector and some […]

TI debuts sub-GHz CC430 based spectrum analyzer

video platformvideo managementvideo solutionsvideo player TI has introduced a sub-GHz spectrum analyzer using the SA430 chip. Known as the MSP-SA430-SUB1GHZ, the CC430 microcontroller that the SA430 is based on is a highly integrated system-on-chip featuring an on-board sub-GHz radio chip based on the CC1101. As TI describes it: The MSP-SA430-SUB1GHZ Spectrum Analyzer is a CC430-based […]

Defcon 19: Vulnerabilities of Wireless Water Meter Networks

Security researcher John McNabb presented this talk at the Defcon 19 (2011) conference highlighting vulnerabilities of wireless water meter systems. John managed a small water system for 13 years and draws on his experiences in this presentation covering water security systems and more importantly the hardware, software, topology, and vulnerabilities of wireless water meter networks […]

Ruxcon 2011: Hacking the wireless world with SDR

Software engineer and perpetural hacker Balint Seeber presented this talk at the Ruxcon 2011 conference held November 19-20, 2011 in Melbourne, AU. Balint presents those unfamiliar with SDR with the basics of the hardware and software you’ll need and highlights what’s out there in the lesser known areas of the RF spectrum. He explains some […]

Matchstiq SDR transceiver

Drone writes to inform us of a new SDR: Here is an interesting new handheld SDR transceiver called Matchstiq from Epiq solutions. 300MHz to 3.8GHz. I sure would like to know how they’re implementing the configurable suboctave RF filters. There is on-board CPU, DSP, and Xilinx Spartan FPGA. Noise figure at 8dB is nothing to […]