Collaborate Disseminate
Love them or hate them, the crop of cheap hand-held amateur radio transceivers is here to stay. They’re generally horrible radios, often smearing spurious emissions across the spectrum, but they’re …read more Continue reading Inexpensive Ham Radio Gets Upgrades Thanks to a Trojan
Intellectually, we all know that we exist in a complex soup of RF energy. Cellular, WiFi, TV, public service radio, radar, ISM-band transmissions from everything from thermometers to garage door …read more Continue reading Inspect the RF Realm with Augmented Reality
The original Ghostbusters movie is a classic that’s still delivering nearly 40 years after its release — just let that sink in for a minute. Almost every aspect of the …read more Continue reading This WiFi Signal Strength Meter Ain’t Afraid of No Ghosts
We all know we live in a soup of electromagnetic radiation, everything from AM radio broadcasts to cosmic rays. Some of it is useful, some is a nuisance, but all …read more Continue reading Visualizing WiFi with a Converted 3D Printer
There’s perhaps no sound more recognizable than the frantic clicking of a Geiger counter. Not because this is some post-apocalyptic world in which everyone is personally acquainted with the operation of said devices, but because it’s such a common effect used in many movies, TV shows, and video games. If …read more
Continue reading Duck And Cover With This WiFi “Geiger Counter”
Have you ever wished you could see in the RF part of the radio spectrum? While such a skill would probably make it hard to get a good night’s rest, it would at least allow you to instantly see dead spots in your WiFi coverage. Not a bad tradeoff.
Unwilling to go full [Geordi La Forge] to be able to visualize RF, [Ken Kawamoto] built the next best thing – an augmented-reality RF signal strength app for his smartphone. Built to aid in the repositioning of his router in the post-holiday cleanup, the app uses the Android ARCore framework to …read more
Continue reading Smartphone App Uses AR to Visualize The RF Spectrum
It’s been a project filled with fits and starts, and it very nearly ended up as a “Fail of the Week” feature, but we’re happy to report that the [Thought Emporium]’s desktop WiFi radio telescope finally works. And it’s pretty darn cool.
If you’ve been following along with the build like we have, you’ll know that this stems from a previous, much larger radio telescope that [Justin] used to visualize the constellation of geosynchronous digital TV satellites. This time, he set his sights closer to home and built a system to visualize the 2.4-GHz WiFi band. A simple helical antenna …read more
Continue reading Desktop Radio Telescope Images The WiFi Universe
What’s more disruptive to the drone first-person view (FPV) experience than dropouts in your video feed when you’re in the middle of a race? Probably nothing, and there’s probably also not much you can do about it. Or is there? Might a simple tracker based on RSSI help keep your video signal locked in?
Honestly, we’re not sure it would, but we think it’s pretty nifty to see [FlyerFpv]’s tracker following his drone around. The idea is simple and uses the full-diversity FPV receiver he already has. Diversity receivers constantly monitor signal strength from multiple antennas to determine which one …read more
Continue reading Super Simple, Super Cheap FPV Drone Tracking
Want to know which way to point your WiFi antenna to get the best signal? It’s a guessing game for most of us, but a quick build of a scanning WiFi antenna using mostly off-the-shelf components could point you in the right direction.
With saturation WiFi coverage in most places these days, optimizing your signal might seem like a pointless exercise. And indeed it seems [shawnhymel] built this more for fun than for practical reasons. Still, we can see applications where a scanning Yagi-Uda antenna would come in handy. The build started with a “WiFi divining rod” [shawnhymel] created from …read more
