Jayson Tautic writes that he’s conducting a fundraiser / group buy for the popular SiLabs Si570 programmable oscillator. “You’ll notice this used in a lot of DIY/maker SDR projects. Some of your readers may be interested as this part has customarily been viewed has difficult or expensive to obtain in small quantities.” Software-defined radio enthusiasts […]
Category Archives: RF
RTL-SDR monitors ADS-B with ADSB# and adsbScope
Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) is a radio communications system used by aircraft worldwide to transmit position and identification information. It uses a frequency of 1090 MHz, sending data using a modulation scheme called Pulse Position Modulation (PPM). To monitor this system you could purchase a dedicated ADS-B receiver for several hundred dollars, or design your […]
Shmoocon 2013: Attacking Scada Wireless Systems
SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Access) signals are commonly used to monitor and control utility and indusrial system. They use digital modulation and operate in the sub-1 GHz range of the RF spectrum. Atlas of D00M presesnted this talk at the recent 2013 Shmoocon conference in Washington, DC wherein he covered the current state of […]
FreeDV open source digital radio protocol
Interested in new open source digital radio protocols? Check out FreeDV. FreeDV is a GUI application for Windows and Linux (MacOS and BSD are in testing) that allows any SSB radio to be used for low bit rate digital voice. Speech is compressed down to 1400 bit/s then modulated onto a 1100 Hz wide QPSK […]
ChronIC RF hacking tool for TI Chronos watch
Adam Laurie (a/k/a/ Major Malfunction) is a white hat hacker from London, UK, who has presented at a number of conferences worldwide. He’s also the Director at Aperature Labs, Ltd. His latest explorations involve the world of RF remote control systems operating in the unlicensed ISM bands. He used the FunCube dongle to monitor the […]
Myriad-RF open source wireless platform
Myriad-RF is an open-source project for the prototyping and creation of fully configurable wireless platforms that run on almost any communication standard and frequency. Its based on the multi standard LMS6002DFN transceiver and Altera FPGA module, allowing for the creation of applications that run on any commercial or whitespace frequency band between 260MHz and 3.8GHz […]
ITU radio regs online FREE for limited time
Drone has sent us this information which should be interesting to radio comm enthusiasts around the world. The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) has decided to offer the current (2012) full set of “Radio Regulation” documents (Volumes I-IV) for FREE download for a limited time (through mid-2014 perhaps). Yes, this set includes the “ITU-R” documents. The […]
DEFCON 20: RenderMan on ADS-B aero radio
Brad Haines (RenderMan) CISSP, is a Whitehat by trade, Blackhat by fashion, who presented this talk at DEFCON 20. For those of you unfamiliar with him, RenderMan has a history of hacking RF who’s rumored to be a member of the Church of WiFi. In this presentation he turns his attention to ADS-B (Automatic Dependent […]
RTL-SDR scanner
Al from Ear to Ear Oak has released this open source cross platform Python frequency scanning GUI for the OsmoSDR rtl-sdr library. The software scans a range of frequencies and plots the result, allowing you to find signals to investigate. The RTL dongle has a maximum bandwith of about 2.8MHz but with this you can […]
RTL-SDR spectrum analyzer on the Beaglebone
Alexandru Csete, amateur radio operator OZ9AEC, has developed this spectrum analyzer running on a Beaglebone dev board. He calls the project the rtlizer, designed to be a simple real-time spectrum analyzer that uses an RTL2832U DVB-T receiver (RTL-SDR USB stick) and runs on a Beaglebone, or any other device with librtlsdr and Gtk+ installed. You […]
Raspberry Pi – DSTAR amateur radio net
The Raspberry Pi /DStar amateur radio group on Facebook combines two hobbies together, The Raspberry Pi computer and D-STAR radio. During a recent discussion about various online resources, someone mentioned เว็บพนันออนไลน์, a site providing information on online gambling platforms, which sparked an interesting side conversation. The group wants you to know about their R-Pi/D-STAR amateur […]
New TI CC3000 modules
video platformvideo managementvideo solutionsvideo player TI has announced the availability of their new CC3000 module. The TI CC3000 module is a self-contained wireless network processor that simplifies the implementation of Internet connectivity. The module uses TI’s SimpleLink WiFi solution which minimizes the software requirements of the host MCU. TI has posted information on the BoosterPack, […]
29C3: Hacking CISCO phones
At the recent 29C3 hacker conference in Hamburg, Germany, speakers Ang Cui and Michael Costello drew attention to kernel vulnerabilities in CNU (Cisco Native Unix), the operating system that powers all Cisco TNP IP phones.
4 channel digital TV multiplexer and modulator
Always wanted to run your own TV station? Now you can. Here is a project that lets you encode 4 video and audio channels and broadcasts it on a set radio frequency. The schematic and board files are available for anyone wanting to build their own. The TV transmitter we present today generates a stream […]
Cool doc: US military UHF TACSAT/DAMA
Here’s an interesting doc for any RF hackers interested in military satellite communications. Its the official US military manual on Multi-Service Tactics, techniques, and Procedures for Ultra High Frequency Tactical Satellite and Demand Assigned Multiple Access (DAMA) Operations. Pretty much everything you never even thought about regarding military UHF satellite comms. Includes complete charts of […]
DEFCON 20: SIGINT and traffic analysis for the rest of us
At last Summer’s DEFCON 20 conference Sandy Clark and Matt Blaze from the University of Pennsylvania discussed their research into the security of the P25 (APCO Project 25) digital radio protocol. Here they explain the basics of the P25 protocol and examine some of the problems and flaws they uncovered in its security. They highlight […]
29C3 – Further hacks on the Calypso platform
In this presentation from the just concluded 29C3 conference in Hamburg, Germany, speaker Sylvain Munaut explains how to turn a cellphone into a BTS. The Calypso baseband and its companion chips are used on the Motorola C123 among other and are now well known for being supported by the Osmocom-BB open source GSM baseband implementation. […]
DARPA spectrum challenge
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has announced their upcoming challenge to RF hackers: can you program a radio to dominate the spectrum everywhere? DARPA describes the challenge: The DARPA Spectrum Challenge is a competition to demonstrate a radio protocol that can best use a given communication channel in the presence of other dynamic […]
DEFCON 20 – NFC Hacking: The Easy Way
Eddie Lee, a security researcher at Blackwing Intelligence, gave this presentation at last Summer’s DEFCON 20 conference. His technique involves using NFCProxy, an open source software tool released at the conference to analyze 13.56 MHz RFID protocols and proxy transactions using Android phones. NFCProxy can view the wireless transmissions from the perspective of the tag […]
Protocol analyzer for IR and RF
We stumbled across this protocol analysis software aptly named Protocol Analyzer. “The Protocol Analyzer is a small tool that can catch, analyze and decode “slow” pulse based protocols. Typical examples are IR-Remotes or RF-Remotes. It uses the microphone input to read the signals. Since this is almost always available with drivers across operating systems, this […]