Every wifi radio is an SDR under the hood. I'm not sure about this hack, but the ESP32 one was limited to just acting as an ADC + gain control. That leaves the guts of the radio still locked down, which limits a lot of use cases where you want wifi frames and time domain data. You either need to accept the latency and extract frames on PC, or add an FPGA, or use two cards fed from same antenna. Tx is also not possible.

The MT7996 chip is available with the banana pi R4 board, which has SFP+ (10 gigabit) so you'd have a near completely open ISM band SDR platform right there, feeding data to your server via fiber optics.

You can buy an rtl-sdr for ~$40 and have a much more interesting frequency range, plus you can use wifi to google stuff while doing it.

Receive only SDRs have been cheap for a long time now.

"Damn, I forgot the garage code"

"oh, no problem"

>tippy tappy

>brrrrrrr

> so that every random laptop could be used as an SDR for many fun and useful applications

I guess the problem with these is they are more likely to be tied/tuned for specific (wifi) frequency ranges. Although 2.4GHz gives bluetooth and zigbee in addition to wifi

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2.4_GHz_radio_use

It’d be neat to see this on ESP32-C5, which also has a 5GHz radio. S3 is 2.4 only.

You'd still have to figure out how to replace the antenna.

I was really excited about this, but as an average home assistant user couldn't really see an application, lol.

The "network coprocessors" are a bit lame imo. I initially tried to use them for packing, but they turned out to be very memory/cache bandwidth limited. They are also standard risk-v pretty much. I did run custom code on them though (and the Mediatek's "dsp" cores that are a bit more interesting extensions-wise, but are even more memory bw starved). There should be enough left in the tree to get one going pretty fast if one so wishes to play with those cores.

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Holy cow... I've got to limit my projects, so I don't repeat history where I kept finding radio shack bags full of parts for ideas. But you can get 3 of those, with external antennas for less than $60 through amazon. I put it in my wish list instead of buying them now. I've got a data diode to finish first.

Sideband on 13 CM sounds like an amazing thing to pull off.

Service monitor?

Why 4ghz?

Which phones still have FM radios?

Yeah, reading stuff like:

"BRINGUP, from a cold radio: what MediaTek's ROM patch does at download (XO, pin mux, the CONN AFE calibration pulse per band, the A-die TOP init by chip ID, pads and CONN switch, the A-dies' eFuse trims); the UMAC pool layout; the common and per-band PHY initialisation; on each A-die the RF init tables, the resistor calibration and the RC filter calibration; the FEM outputs and the crystal trim."

That's not even some other language poorly translated to English, that's just a bunch of words.

Between stuff like this and math "proofs" that aren't readable either I'm really challenged to see the benefit here.

What I get out of this is that one could, if you had the documentation, write a more generalized SDR application for this hardware than the Wifi7 application. That an LLM model can provoke this behavior seems as a good existence proof perhaps?

If someone wants to set up some hardware in a harness and then spend their tokens reverse engineering it, I'm thankful for the publication.

A year ago it was different. I looked at a lot of these vibe-RE projects and a lot of them wouldn't even do what they claimed. Now if someone points a frontier model at some code and lets it consume tokens for a few days, the output is often valuable as a starting point for other projects.

Claude or not: It's a huge breakthrough for ham radio and signal analysis.

We now can programm more manual tuned stuff to turn this into a full 13cm and 5cm radio as it was proven to work.

Before the esp-sdr hack and this one both bands were quite difficult and pricey to reach.

Try using GPT to write software like this, I don't think just anyone could do it unless they know the problem domain well. Understanding something is not something any AI can replace (yet).

More like "turn a locked-down single-purpose SDR into a general-purpose SDR"

At the moment I have 5x RTL-SDR dongles streaming into a box on different bands (137, 433, 912, 978, and 1090 MHz). They pick up all kinds of things, from local weather stations to the water meter for my condo to ADS-B/UAT transmissions from local aircraft. I even see the tire pressure monitor signals from cars that drive by (some of you guys need to add air!).

Mostly it's just fun. I like peeking at all the ambient transmissions in the area.

A while back I was more deeply involved in the SDR space and even reverse-engineered some pager signals. At least a few years ago, pagers were still widely used in hospitals (totally in plaintext, by the way).

It is cool to do. But there are professional uses for it, particularly like finding interference or noise. You can ask things like: "How crowded is my 2.4 GHz spectrum?"

The RTL SDR is the gateway drug into SDR's. The bandwidth is limited, so don't expect to be capturing HDTV Streams. But it's certainly possible to listen to AM/FM, Ham Bands, VHF/UHF signals, etc.

If you don't want to buy an RTL-SDR, you can search KiwiSDR which is a streaming SDR for frequencies under 30MHz. You can also connect to KiwiSDR's worldwide.

Then if you get the itch, you can go get your a HackRF, a ham license, or whatever else scratches it.

Many consumer temperature, humidity, rain, and wind sensors use simple radio protocols in the 433 MHz band to report their readings back to their indoor display unit.

Stick an RTL-SDR dongle on your computer and use the program rtl_433 to monitor that traffic. It comes with built-in decoders for the protocols for a very large number of those sensors.

I've got such a setup and I can see not only my one sensors (An AcuRite outdoor thermometer, and the two sensors from an AcuRite fridge/freeze thermometer) but also a few neighbor's temperature sensors, humidity sensors, soil moisture sensors, wind speed and direction sensors, rain gauges, and their tire pressure.

You can set up MQTT and have rtl_433 report the data that way, and you can have Home Assistant get that and display it. It knows how to handle a variety of sensor types.

I haven't done that yet. I just have rtl_433 log everything by appending JSON records to a file. A script reads that, finds the sensors I care about, and stores their data in an sqlite database.

I think it is cool to do, but only because first I worked through doing it. I never got around to cleaning the repo up for human consumption, but here’s the resulting code Claude and I assembled for running lights and fans in my living room. https://github.com/tclancy/radiofrequency/blob/main/firmware...

All via a tiny web server in an ESP32 with a radio attached. And the parts I bought for decoding the signals were cheap and let me replicate the process easily. Which reminds me I should push the Claude skill I created for doing this up into that repo. I even had Claude build me a Streamlit app to teach me how to read the signals. https://ook-signal-explorer.streamlit.app/

I've used it to identify transmissions in my neighborhood in the public (ISM) band, listen to various radio broadcasts outside the normal AM/FM, and best of all, track all the planes in my area (ADS-B).

Satdump group uses them receiving all kind of weather satellites. They are mastering S-/X-Band stuff for ages already.

Ham radio operators looking forward using them for 13cm and 5cm band stuff.

I'd assume top notch if it's Wi-Fi certified. And basically all Mediatek modems are.

You cannot sell them with the tag if it wasn't connected to standardized certification test system at least once.

It's RX-only.

Yeah, mine is arriving tomorrow, because I totally needed another unused SDR platform.

> Am I understanding that this is doing something the chipset wasn’t designed to do?

Every WiFi modem has a testmode. It's required to verify the TX/RX chain during manufacturing and for compliance testing.

Seemingly you can read out the entire spectrum at full rate.

Msps = Mega samples per second

mega samples per second. IOW: sample rate.

The significance is that most off the shelf SDR platforms have much lower specs. Almost all of them use the same Analog Devices transceiver chip.

Can you order them from amazon.com? I've ordered stuff from amazon.co.jp and amazon.de before and although it doesn't get there in two days, it does show up eventually.

Conventionally, a radio receiver is a pipeline of electronic components that decode a radio signal into some form you expect: audio, video, digital data, radar returns, whatever. This set of components is typically not "agile": it can decode only a limited set of signal types from some limited set of frequencies, so you need different receiver hardware for different type of radio signals.

Ideally, a software defined receiver replaces all of that with some high speed programmable component that can decode all types of signals across all frequencies, simultaneously. The ideal software defined receiver connects an antenna to a pin on a processor and software does everything digitally: demodulation, filtering, etc.

Physics and the limits of our semiconductor technology doesn't actually permit this ideal to exist. We can, however, achieve some degree of it, and improving components have expanded capabilities and made it cost effective.

ChatGPT would know. I think some parts of a radio system are being done in software, which adds flexibility to its use.