today at 5:29 PM
This same devloper also built an SDR out of an ESP32 Wi-Fi microcontroller [1], this is awesome!
This development makes me hope that we'd be seeing more of these on common Wi-Fi cards, so that every random laptop could be used as an SDR for many fun and useful applications on a budget.
https://github.com/h0m3us3r/eSpDR
today at 10:45 PM
It’d be neat to see this on ESP32-C5, which also has a 5GHz radio. S3 is 2.4 only.
today at 9:24 PM
I was really excited about this, but as an average home assistant user couldn't really see an application, lol.
today at 5:26 PM
FYI, since it's the same chipset I'm pretty certain this will work on the Banana Pi R4, which has built in PCIe for NVMe.
today at 6:22 PM
[flagged]
today at 6:26 PM
mt7996 is MTK
today at 8:38 PM
Is this kind of thing why samsung asks you to sign a contract before letting third parties use the FM radios on their phones? Because many phone radios nowadays are software defined?
today at 9:19 PM
Which phones still have FM radios?
today at 10:25 PM
A lot of Samsung's low end phones sold worldwide still have them.
today at 5:12 PM
Having done repairs on a ton of older service monitors, and having my hand in SDR, this is amazing! There's a huge amount of machining and hardware to make a service monitor, but with desktop CNC, cheap PCBS, and jelly bean components that go into the 10s of GHz, the sky's the limit.
I'd add a heat sunk 100 watt DC-5Ghz 20dB fixed attenuator, 0-110 dB switched attenuator, 5 ghz low pass filter, 7-12 Ghz local oscillator/mixer up/down converter, and it would make a small, very high performance service monitor good to 5 Ghz. 8)
today at 8:03 PM
Service monitor?
today at 8:11 PM
A Communications service monitor is a tool for servicing radios. Until recently, most large organizations used VHF/UHF FM radio for communications on dedicated channels. A service monitor is a tool that can usually absorb the full output power of these radios while measuring power, frequency, distortion, etc. They can also generate a variety of signals for aligning receivers.
Most of the older, affordable models go from almost DC to 1 Ghz. I've got an IFR 2947a, which goes up to 1.05 Ghz.
Here's an example from ebay.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/168770412399
Here's a specification sheet for the one I have, a pdf
https://www.testmart.com/webdata/mfr_pdfs/aerofl/2947a.pdf
today at 6:20 PM
Why 4ghz?
today at 6:46 PM
I've edited it, but generally you don't want to have problems with mirror images getting through and creating spurious responses. Real world RF filters don't have infinitely steep edges, so initially I figured a 4 Ghz low pass filter would have enough loss by 5 Ghz to get the job done. I revised to to a 5 Ghz low filter, and a 7-12 Ghz Local Oscillator to give the filter an easier job. Also, the lower the swing in percentage terms for a VCO, the easier it is to work with.
So the signal path in receive mode would be:
N connector / 20 dB 100 watt pad / Switched attenuator / Low pass filter / Front End diodes / Mixer / Router board for DSP
Alternatively, there's usually a second path that skips the attenuator, with a lower maximum power level.
The reverse path would work for generating signals from DC (almost) to 5 Ghz.
today at 4:40 PM
Wow that's super cool! It's not DC to daylight but I sure don't know a cheaper way to get a 320 Msps receiver at 5 GHz.
today at 5:00 PM
Thanks claude
today at 5:06 PM
Yeah, reading stuff like:
"BRINGUP, from a cold radio: what MediaTek's ROM patch does at download (XO, pin mux, the CONN AFE calibration pulse per band, the A-die TOP init by chip ID, pads and CONN switch, the A-dies' eFuse trims); the UMAC pool layout; the common and per-band PHY initialisation; on each A-die the RF init tables, the resistor calibration and the RC filter calibration; the FEM outputs and the crystal trim."
That's not even some other language poorly translated to English, that's just a bunch of words.
Between stuff like this and math "proofs" that aren't readable either I'm really challenged to see the benefit here.
What I get out of this is that one could, if you had the documentation, write a more generalized SDR application for this hardware than the Wifi7 application. That an LLM model can provoke this behavior seems as a good existence proof perhaps?
today at 5:19 PM
> That's not even some other language poorly translated to English, that's just a bunch of words.
The language makes sense if you've worked with radio chips or firmware.
Terms like XO (crystal oscillator) and pin mux (chip pin multiplexer, basically assigning pins to their role) are common for embedded work, not just radio work.
Usually in a project you get that language hidden in a separate implementation doc where casual readers won't get confused by it.
today at 5:40 PM
Yes there are radio terms in there. :-) That said, I've written combined firmware/gateware drivers for dedicated radio chips and that paragraph makes little sense to me. Even the RFSoC docs from AMD/Xilinx are better written and they are pretty damn dense.
today at 6:10 PM
> Even the RFSoC docs from AMD/Xilinx are better written
This project isn't meant to be vendor-quality documentation of the chipset. It's a reverse engineering project that succeeded and included enough documentation to build upon.
Comparing a freely shared reverse engineering proof of concept to vendor-provided 1st party documentation is a ridiculous high bar.
This is a cool project that was just shared hours ago. Criticizing it for not being 1st party vendor documentation quality is a really bad faith criticism.
today at 7:43 PM
Okay. So let's pretend it is simple a proof-of-concept (PoC) rather than a full blown project, it's opening paragraph in README.md is:
"Turns a Gemtek W1700K Wi-Fi 7 router into a wideband software-defined receiver. The router's MediaTek MT7996 radio captures raw 14-bit IQ at up to 320 Msps, its Airoha AN7581 SoC streams it over 10 GbE, and a Linux host shows it as a live spectrum and waterfall in the browser, with the receiver's controls next to it."
Does that read paragraph say "Hey check out this PoC!" to you?
So a human, used Claude code to reverse engineer a device. Fine, let THAT be the readme. If it had said, "This is something that was accomplished with Claude code reverse engineering this thing, I have no idea how it works, but that it does work is evidenced by the spectrum I can show."
For those of us who are "skilled in the art" as they say, this reads like "Hey check this out, I bypassed the paywall by putting in my Mom's credit card number!" The lede here is that Claude can reverse engineer things. That was most informatively shown with an article that showed up here titled "All the things I own, owned."
The comment I replied to simply said, "Thanks Claude." Which is droll, but accurate. And, for me, the criticism of showing off something you "did" with a tool you don't understand and whose outputs you don't understand, reminds me strongly of the script kiddies of the 90's and naughts who would boldly proclaim "Hey, check it out, I got root on <website>." when all they had done was run Metasploit and walked through a bunch of scripts until they hit an RCE vulnerability and then used it to gain root (with another script).
So at some point the vendor will go through and patch the holes which the model had exploited and they will have to rewrite their admin architecture, and maybe be liable to some fines with the chip companies if "Intellectual Property" was improperly disclosed by their failure to write good software. And are we any closer to using the products as a general purpose SDR? No, we are not.
Contrast that with the folks who reverse engineered the RealTek DVB-T tuner chip, and had an understanding of what they had done and how it worked, and it spawned a bunch of RTL-SDR dongles that introduced lots of people to SDRs.
It is a really cool project, and it is an interesting proof of concept which could be the starting point for reverse engineering these boxes. But the author chose to present it as a complete ready to go project with documentation of things like their "architecture."
I suspect it is also true that neither the author, and certainly not the large language model, has any idea about how this firmware even works.
today at 9:00 PM
> So at some point the vendor will go through and patch the holes which the model had exploited and they will have to rewrite their admin architecture, and maybe be liable to some fines with the chip companies if "Intellectual Property" was improperly disclosed by their failure to write good software. And are we any closer to using the products as a general purpose SDR? No, we are not.
What? It tunes and it's streaming IQ over Ethernet. It is a general purpose SDR! You can use it as a general purpose SDR immediately.
I'd like a little more information from someone who actually knew what they were doing (or even just asked Claude to write it out in more detail) about the "real" nuts and bolts of the receiver, too (how's does IQ imbalance calibration work? How much dynamic range does it really have? How much can we configure the frontend, in detail?), but I don't think it's fair to claim this project is skiddie-level or not useful at this stage just because it was written by Claude.
Also, who's going to fine Mediatek for exposing Mediatek IP?
today at 5:35 PM
> I'm really challenged to see the benefit here.
> write a more generalized SDR application for this hardware
Yeahhh, no. Sorry but the entry barrier is now extremely lowered, especially in effort.
~20 years ago this would have been literally sci-fi. Back then just getting an USRP to work with gnu-radio, then finding the proper hardware external clock, then doing lots of work on reading / trying stuff / writing scripts etc. took a ton of effort and time. Having the ability to throw tokens at it and have at least a starting point is amazing, IMO.
today at 5:26 PM
If someone wants to set up some hardware in a harness and then spend their tokens reverse engineering it, I'm thankful for the publication.
A year ago it was different. I looked at a lot of these vibe-RE projects and a lot of them wouldn't even do what they claimed. Now if someone points a frontier model at some code and lets it consume tokens for a few days, the output is often valuable as a starting point for other projects.
today at 8:37 PM
Try using GPT to write software like this, I don't think just anyone could do it unless they know the problem domain well. Understanding something is not something any AI can replace (yet).
today at 5:09 PM
Claude or not: It's a huge breakthrough for ham radio and signal analysis.
We now can programm more manual tuned stuff to turn this into a full 13cm and 5cm radio as it was proven to work.
Before the esp-sdr hack and this one both bands were quite difficult and pricey to reach.
today at 5:11 PM
Why is this a breakthrough? Just because the platform costs under $100?
today at 5:12 PM
320MSPS at this frequencies for less than $100 that can be extracted over 10GBit/s.
This was worth upper 4- to 5-digit of dollars of equipment before.
I work in this industry and sold more than one kidney for this stuff.
Same for the ESP-SDR project. Most likely it can be used for transmitting on S-Band for satellite control in the future (with an amplifier, dish, maybe some filtering). The HF-Frontend is Wi-Fi certified and therefore quite clean. I've forwarded this project to a friend who's close to ESA staff.
today at 5:18 PM
You're referencing a 5-figure rig like the ADRV9040 I suppose? I don't work in that industry but I do dabble in SDR hobbies and I guess due to my advancing age I view this as linear progress rather than breakthroughs. Two decades ago it was $1 million worth of junk.
today at 5:24 PM
> ADRV9040
Yes. That's a very modern design. Lots of MIMO.. so I assume you will find that beast in cellular base stations.
I'd more see it as a huge jump in the higher frequencies.
>2GHz basically became cheap now over night.
Thanks to Claude&co. it now only takes maybe a few hours to find (or brute force ) potential registers to spit out raw I/Q streams. The last huge breakthrough there was the now rather old Rtlsdr project around the Osmocom dudes.
today at 5:32 PM
> Claude&co
OpenAI seething that they didn’t pick a fucking name for their platform.
today at 6:50 PM
ChatGPT? Aka Chat-gippty, or chatty? At chat.com?
today at 6:09 PM
I can't keep up with the rapid, non stop cool stuff being discovered! Someone figured out how to get the ESP32 to transmit, at lower bandwidth (I think I read 200-250khz) I don't know which project it was but there are a bunch on this site:
https://www.rtl-sdr.com/esp32-sdr-turbo-mode-throughput-impr...
today at 7:00 PM
Holy cow... I've got to limit my projects, so I don't repeat history where I kept finding radio shack bags full of parts for ideas. But you can get 3 of those, with external antennas for less than $60 through amazon. I put it in my wish list instead of buying them now. I've got a data diode to finish first.
Sideband on 13 CM sounds like an amazing thing to pull off.
today at 5:22 PM
What is the radio quality like SNR?
today at 5:28 PM
I'd assume top notch if it's Wi-Fi certified. And basically all Mediatek modems are.
You cannot sell them with the tag if it wasn't connected to standardized certification test system at least once.
today at 7:08 PM
$80 here? https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DR7KMNC4
That's quite a good deal...
today at 7:50 PM
Yeah, mine is arriving tomorrow, because I totally needed another unused SDR platform.
today at 5:33 PM
wow, could this be turned into a 2.4ghz SAR? I always wondered if it’d be possible to use something like that to pick up wifi signals from much farther away. Of course a more sensible choice would just be to use a yagi antenna
today at 5:48 PM
It's RX-only.
today at 5:56 PM
Yet.
today at 6:21 PM
Ssshhh. Don't wake the FCC.
today at 5:07 PM
An accurate description is "turn an SDR into an SDR".
today at 6:28 PM
More like "turn a locked-down single-purpose SDR into a general-purpose SDR"
today at 6:53 PM
What do normal people use SDRs for? I'm genuinely curious. Or is it just cool to do?
today at 8:52 PM
At the moment I have 5x RTL-SDR dongles streaming into a box on different bands (137, 433, 912, 978, and 1090 MHz). They pick up all kinds of things, from local weather stations to the water meter for my condo to ADS-B/UAT transmissions from local aircraft. I even see the tire pressure monitor signals from cars that drive by (some of you guys need to add air!).
Mostly it's just fun. I like peeking at all the ambient transmissions in the area.
A while back I was more deeply involved in the SDR space and even reverse-engineered some pager signals. At least a few years ago, pagers were still widely used in hospitals (totally in plaintext, by the way).
today at 7:12 PM
It is cool to do. But there are professional uses for it, particularly like finding interference or noise. You can ask things like: "How crowded is my 2.4 GHz spectrum?"
The RTL SDR is the gateway drug into SDR's. The bandwidth is limited, so don't expect to be capturing HDTV Streams. But it's certainly possible to listen to AM/FM, Ham Bands, VHF/UHF signals, etc.
If you don't want to buy an RTL-SDR, you can search KiwiSDR which is a streaming SDR for frequencies under 30MHz. You can also connect to KiwiSDR's worldwide.
Then if you get the itch, you can go get your a HackRF, a ham license, or whatever else scratches it.
today at 8:59 PM
today at 6:57 PM
I've used it to identify transmissions in my neighborhood in the public (ISM) band, listen to various radio broadcasts outside the normal AM/FM, and best of all, track all the planes in my area (ADS-B).
today at 7:11 PM
Satdump group uses them receiving all kind of weather satellites. They are mastering S-/X-Band stuff for ages already.
Ham radio operators looking forward using them for 13cm and 5cm band stuff.
today at 6:00 PM
Anyone know how to get ahold of a device in Europe?
today at 6:44 PM
Can you order them from amazon.com? I've ordered stuff from amazon.co.jp and amazon.de before and although it doesn't get there in two days, it does show up eventually.
today at 7:50 PM
Super awesome.
Not the point but the Airhona could here is really neat. AN7581 with typical quad Cortex-A53 but then 8x RISC-V network coprocessors. Good luck figuring out how to use that though, whew! (Go Astra go.) https://www.airoha.com/products/p/NpfqGLnZiZuYUZ6N
I've been thinking how beautiful and awesome it is that SDR finally has a real jump. The QuadRF using the rpi's mipi connector was such a glorious hack! Custom ADC from parts. 80MSps. https://www.crowdsupply.com/scale-rf/quadrf
And man what a huge flying leap forward here. 320MSps! Much deeper 14b IQ precision vs 8b. The totally custom mediatek radio firmware is incredible. Such incredible possibility. Maybe someday the mimo can be useful for some of the same neat AoE / beam forming capabilities?
today at 6:23 PM
Am I understanding that this is doing something the chipset wasn’t designed to do?
I’m not seeing a synopsis of the significance of this, for the uninitiated
What is Msps? I’m not familiar with that scale
today at 6:39 PM
> Am I understanding that this is doing something the chipset wasn’t designed to do?
Every WiFi modem has a testmode. It's required to verify the TX/RX chain during manufacturing and for compliance testing.
Seemingly you can read out the entire spectrum at full rate.
today at 6:29 PM
mega samples per second. IOW: sample rate.
The significance is that most off the shelf SDR platforms have much lower specs. Almost all of them use the same Analog Devices transceiver chip.
today at 6:26 PM
Msps = Mega samples per second
today at 6:25 PM
Now if you could also make it transmit such samples a few of those could make a nice DIY phase array for some of the most fun bands to play with.