Category Archives: sdr

Pokemon Go Cheat Fools GPS with Software Defined Radio

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Using Xcode to spoof GPS locations in Pokemon Go (like we saw this morning) isn’t that much of a hack, and frankly, it’s not even a legit GPS spoof. After all, it’s not like we’re using an SDR to spoof the physical GPS signal to cheat Pokemon Go.

To [Stefan Kiese], this isn’t much more than an exercise. He’s not even playing Pokemon Go. To squeeze a usable GPS signal out of his HackRF One, a $300 Software Defined Radio, [Stefan] uses an external precision clock. This makes up for the insufficient calibration of the HackRF’s internal clock, although he …read more

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LuaRadio Brings More Options to SDR

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GNURadio is the swiss-army-knife of software-defined radio suites: it does everything and anything. It has a great GUI overlayer that makes creating radio flows fairly simple. There are only two areas where we could quibble with the whole system — it’s a gigantic suite of software, and it’s a lot harder to code up in Python than it is to use the GUI.

[Vanya Sergeev] started up his LuaRadio project to deal with these shortcomings. If you’re looking for the full-GUI experience, you’re barking up the wrong tree here. LuaRadio is aimed at keeping things easy to code and keeping …read more

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GPS And SDR Combine Forces

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Software-defined radio (or SDR) is a relatively new (to average tinkerers, at least) way of sending and receiving radio signals. The interest in SDR exploded recently with the realization that cheap USB TV tuner cards could be used to start exploring the frequency spectrum at an extremely reduced cost. One of the reasons that this is so advantageous is because of all of the options that a general-purpose computer opens up that go beyond transmitting and receiving, as [Chris] shows with his project that ties SDR together with GPS.

The goal of the project was to automatically tune a radio …read more

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Hackaday Dictionary: Software Defined Radio (SDR)

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We are entering a new era of radio technology. A new approach to building radios has made devices like multi-band cell phones and the ubiquitous USB TV receivers that seamlessly flit from frequency to frequency possible. That technology is Software Defined Radio, or SDR.

A idealized radio involves a series of stages. Firstly, an antenna receives the radio signal, converting it into an electrical signal. This signal is fed into a tuned resonator which is tuned to a particular frequency. This amplifies the desired signal, which is then sent to a demodulator, a device which extracts the required information from …read more

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Software Defined Radio App Store

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Software defined radios (SDRs) can–in theory–do almost anything you need a radio to do. Voice? Data? Frequency hopping? Trunking? No problem, you just write the correct software, and you are in.

That’s the problem, though. You need to know how to write the software. LimeSDR is an open source SDR with a crowdfunding campaign. By itself, that’s not anything special. There are plenty of SDR devices available. What makes LimeSDR interesting is that it is using Snappy Ubuntu Core as a sort of app store. Developers can make code available, and end-users can easily download and install that code.

Of …read more

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SDR Cape for BeagleBone

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In the old days if you wanted to listen to shortwave you had to turn a dial. Later, you might have been able to tap in a frequency with a keypad. With modern software-defined radio (and the right hardware) you can just listen to the entire high-frequency spectrum at one time. That’s the idea behind KiwiSDR, an open source daughterboard (ok, cape) for the BeagleBone.

The front end covers 10 kHz to 30 MHz and has a 14-bit converter operating at 65 MHz. There is a Xilinx Artix-7 A35 FPGA onboard and a GPS, too. The design is open source …read more

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RF Hacking: How-To Bypass Rolling Codes

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The RF signal transmitted from a modern key fob and received by the associated vehicle is only used once. If the vehicle sees the same code again it rejects the command, however there is a loophole in those carefully chosen words. The code must be received by the vehicle’s computer before it can be added to the list of spent codes. [AndrewMohawk] goes through the process of intercepting a code sent from a key fob transmitter and preventing the vehicle from receiving it in a thorough post to his blog. You can see this attack working in his studio quality …read more

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