QuadRF can spot drones and see WiFi through my wall(jeffgeerling.com) |
QuadRF can spot drones and see WiFi through my wall(jeffgeerling.com) |
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've seen so many random industrial devices and parts come into our plant that have their own cellular it's wild.
Well... most TVs already have a WiFi/BT chipset for stuff like advertisements or, especially with Apple, high-bandwidth video streaming. There is already a radio module present, but (IIRC) you don't have to disclose what exactly that module is capable of.
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?)
https://hackaday.com/2016/07/01/1024-pixel-sound-camera-trea...
https://www.fluke.com/en-us/product/industrial-imaging/fluke...
I think a few people have made homebrew versions too, like this one mentioned on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45137584
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 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.
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.
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.
From documentation, QuadRF: Operating frequency range of 4.9 - 6.0 GHz (C-Band).
It would be great to have a wider range like other SDRs but of course the cost will increase exponentially.
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.
They came out at $500
Being off by a bit is fine. Being off by 5x to 10x is.. Yikes.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/1uso8u1/insanity/
Point still stands that they initially said it would be $50-$100. And its going for $500.
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.
And I've read about airport shutdowns in UK and US without a single arrest which is why it keeps happening
So whatever system exists, apparently not good enough
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...
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 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
This gizmo is primarily interesting that it's pre-packaged at a price that hobbyists can afford.
It does become a bit more difficult with consumer grade off the shelf drones because it's built in. Still defeatable by the determined of course.
This seems more like a tool for checking across entire large assemblies like an entire building, car, aircraft, etc, for unknown sources. If you have an individual discrete device that you're already testing, just using traditional instrumentation seems reasonable, but on a large, complex assembly, I can see it being useful. Also useful for things like detecting if a particular antenna is working without actually going up there to measure near it; if you have a MIMO setup with multiple antennas, this might make it easier to check if all of them are working correctly when mounted in inconvenient areas.
Odd, because export controls don't generally apply to published material (like open source software), but maybe they were worried that because they were also selling the hardware they could have issues due to the combo being export controlled.
This seems more useful for finding unknown or hidden RF sources, for instance looking thorugh an entire building to find unknown RF sources, or maybe a whole complex assembly like a car or aircraft.