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)

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.

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 don't see any professionals turning to this for EMC/EMI testing, they already have all the test equipment for that job.

That's absolutely missing the point. EMC/EMI testing is expensive, time consuming and requires scheduling and experiment design.

Being able to do local soft-run testing on-site to be sure that you eliminate the easy 90% of issues before you get to the lab would be a huge win.

How about "non-professionals"? It could be useful to check device before sending for pre-compliance / compliance checks and save money - that would avoid very expensive iterations.

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.

Do you have specific SDR in mind? I thought the v2 dongle doesnt have the range of Wifi? SDR is something Ive just recently want to learn to help me understand electromagnetism

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

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

Please elaborate. There are literary step-by-step videos on how to build these. E.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3LT_b6K0Mc

Phased array radars are export controlled in the US. It doesnt mean its illegal to build or own, but it might be illegal to sell in some cases

Do share some more details please

The explanation may be spelled ITAR.

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

It also appears to have a fairly narrow detection angle. This might work for spotting a drone when you already know roughly where it is, but that problem becomes infinitely harder when you have to scan the entire sky.

RF drone detection has been a challenging problem for quite a while. Lots of solid state radar/RF detection products have emerged in the space, but it is not a trivial problem. And that is for drones with active RF comms, anything flying autonomously is even harder to detect at a far enough range to actually do something about.

> RF drone detection has been a challenging problem for quite a while.

Correct, there is no bullet proof cuas system to this date.

> anything flying autonomously is even harder to detect

Not just autonomously, because even in autonomous mode you would still need other RF like gnss, but you can fly drones without any rf signature at all and utilize a pre captured images saved on board to navigate the drone accurately using its cameras (normal or thermal). In this case, rf interference won’t work, it won’t be detected based on rf signature either, you will have to rely solely on visuals and acoustic, fly at night, and only left with acoustics.. it is a very hard task from technical standpoint.

Is that a limitation of the antenna? I though QuadRF uses SDR so can see many frequencies, not just the wifi things like ESPARGOS [0]

From documentation, QuadRF: Operating frequency range of 4.9 - 6.0 GHz (C-Band).

0. https://espargos.net/

Not the antenna, unfortunately, it only operates on the range of 4.9-6ghz.

It would be great to have a wider range like other SDRs but of course the cost will increase exponentially.

https://www.crowdsupply.com/scale-rf/quadrf

for lack of directonality?

for lack of frequency tuning

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

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.

Prices have gone a little insane in the last year though too to be fair to them.

It looks like it has 4 tiles on it, no?

Yea its mimo 2x2.

Point still stands that they initially said it would be $50-$100. And its going for $500.

I mean if a single tile is 50-100, then 4 is 200-400, so it's not that far?

> 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

Open source is the future. If everyone can work on it, we get better results for cheaper.

Open source doesn't mean the end of competition, since we are a competitive species.

I think the future economy is going to be some sort of UBI + large open source projects

Most major airports will already have a counter-UAS system, it's a huge industry.

One big issue with radar is that it has the same problem pilots and human observers do: it struggles to distinguish drones from anything else in the sky (birds, balloons, planes, etc.). This is an active and improving research space, but by and large with radar, when your pilots report a drone, you still don't know how to figure out if it's the typical mis-identification or something real.

Yes, primary radar has been useful for detecting airspace incursions since 1939. Nothing new here.

The difference with this kind of tech, though, is tracking down the operator.

If would likely need to track them well (not sure from this article/video if that's the case?) to be useful in that scenario...

Drawing a splodge in roughly the location (not sure if there's range info either? I doubt it if it's passive) overlaid on the video likely won't cut it...

Phased array antennas (in use since the 1960s) and AESA (in use since the 1990s) are very mature tech that RF engineers are well aware of.

This gizmo is primarily interesting that it's pre-packaged at a price that hobbyists can afford.

Only the ones that use radio for control. The fiberoptic ones are "dark" to this setup.

There are more way advanced systems for cuas, where they infuse radar and visual and acoustic plus now AI to minimize the false positives, but practically speaking, they are not bullet proof and still fail. RID (remote ID) is a way to have a cooperative communication and was mandated in US, but there are ways too to spoof it and cloak it.