QuadRF can spot drones and see WiFi through my wall

One day I want to build something like this, except for sound. It would be great to get a heading and distance for where a sound is coming from.

This could be both for small scale things (e.g. which part of this is squeaking?) or large scale (e.g. is that booming noise coming from the construction a few blocks away?)

The visualizer reminds me of my thermal camera.

I have heard claims of devices (mostly TVs) supposedly coming with secret 5G cell uplinks built in [never heard a specific model mentioned though].

If there were more variants covering more commonly-used RF bands, people could walk around and literally check for once.

(incidentally i'm sure three letter agencies have had this sort of tech in their bug-detecting toolkit for a LONG time)

> It sounds like they had to reverse-engineer the MIPI protocol used on the Pi 5 to do this (since it goes through the RP1 chip), and the way it's architected, you can daisy-chain multiple QuadRF modules together, letting each module calculate it's own phase shift.

How are they planning on distributing a shared, highly precise clock for that purpose? That's already a PITA if you do QO-100 modes that need high precision, but usually there it's enough to have one good clock that you feed to the LNA... but here? Every single one of these modules needs a very precisely identical timing signal and the kind of chips you can use to multiplex a reference clock signal are pretty expensive.

I wonder if this tool can help with EMC compliance testing. My TinySA needs an LNA, so I wonder if this has the required noise floor.

I recall reading the original research paper from a student who made the same RF ‘camera’ here in hacker news.

Historically these have been quickly shut down without much of an explanation.

The visualizer app reminds me of the same UI / output you get from acoustic cameras.

Neat! SDRs have been available at reasonable price points for some time but the processing power to engage with wifi and other digital signals has been somewhat elusive. Assuming RAM can be purchased in the future, I think we might see a lot more prosumer-targeted devices for doing raw signal analysis in the future.

It should be more specific, it spots RC drones operated on ~5.8ghz, it won’t spot RC on 900mhz, nor cellular enabled ones.

Sigh, fine. I will buy another radio gadget on crowdsupply.

I was almost through the checkout flow last week before I realized that this configuration only supports a relatively narrow frequency range.

I work primarily in sub-GHz radio. Please wake me up when they launch their LoRa version, that would be an instant purchase for me.

And yet since rtl-sdr times we have passive radars as an option as well https://www.rtl-sdr.com/tag/passive-radar/

The original quote for a single tile was $50-$100

They came out at $500

Being off by a bit is fine. Being off by 5x to 10x is.. Yikes.

if it can spot/track drones that is a marketing opportunity for airports around the world that have to deal with drone nonsense which shut down flights for days

> If the open source community can come up with something like this, just imagine what governments are capable of.

Since ~2022 and accelerated by the Russian aggression against Ukraine, governments are now behind both private and open source for frontier technology.

The companies that captured government contracts in the last century can’t move fast enough to bring tech into the government and national technology policy and funding is collapsing compared to the private sector

That’s new in history

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