Category Archives: software-defined radio

Transmitting Analog TV, Digitally

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If you want to really understand a technology, and if you’re like us, you’ll need to re-build it yourself. It’s one thing to say that you understand (analog) broadcast TV by reading up on Wikipedia, or even by looking at scope traces. But when you’ve written a flow graph that successfully transmits a test image to a normal TV using just a software-defined radio, you can pretty easily say that you’ve mastered the topic.

[Marble] wrote his flow for PAL, but it should be fairly easy to modify it to work with NTSC if you’re living in the US or …read more

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Arduino + Software Defined Radio = Millions of Vulnerable Volkswagens

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As we’ve mentioned previously, the integrity of your vehicle in an era where even your car can have a data connection could be a dubious bet at best. Speaking to these concerns, a soon-to-be published paper out of the University of Birmingham in the UK, states that virtually every Volkswagen sold since 1995 can be hacked and unlocked by cloning the vehicle’s keyfob via an Arduino and software defined radio (SDR).

The research team, led by [Flavio Garcia], have described two main vulnerabilities: the first requires combining a cyrptographic key from the vehicle with the signal from the owner’s fob …read more

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The Problem with Software Defined Radio

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There’s a problem with software defined radio. It’s not that everyone needs to re-learn what TEMPEST shielding is, and it’s not that Bluetooth is horribly broken. SDR’s biggest problem is one of bandwidth and processing. With a simple USB TV Tuner, you can listen in on aircraft, grab Landsat images from hundreds of miles up, or sniff the low-power radios used in Internet of Things things. What you can’t do is make your own WiFi adapter, and you can’t create your own LTE wireless network. This is simply a problem of getting bits from the air to a computer for …read more

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Amazing SDR Built by 16 Year Old

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[Lukas] started his epic SDR-from-scratch build when he was 16. Projects like this aren’t completed overnight. (He’s now 18. We’re impressed.)

The project itself is a Software-Defined Radio built on top of the 12-bit Analog Devices AD9364 transceiver IC. A big fat FPGA takes the data and runs it off to a USB 3.0 interface, which is necessary for the amount of data this thing will be producing — he’s got it receiving 56 MHz of bandwidth. In short, this is an SDR peripheral that’s in the big leagues.

After two years of work and (only!) three revision, [Lukas] got …read more

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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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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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