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QuadRF can spot drones and see WiFi through my wall

jeffgeerling.com

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Re: QuadRF can spot drones and see WiFi through my wall

#51

Post by ck2 »

bri3d wrote: post #6
ck2 wrote: post #3

if it can spot/track drones that is a marketing opportunity for airports around the world that have to deal with drone nonsense which shut down flights for days

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…

I'm reading about pilots spotting drones during takeoff/landing that the airport didn't know about

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

Re: QuadRF can spot drones and see WiFi through my wall

#53

Post by ethin »

mikeweiss wrote: post #41
mlfreeman wrote: post #34

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…

Whos paying the telcos for those 5G connections and also has the FCC been degraded so much that they would allow for undeclared radios in consumer products?

The FCC is literally powerless nowadays for all intents and purposes. They've abrogated so much of their authority to the states now that they might as well be eliminated. What little authority that remains with it is bought and paid for to the point that I'm sure you could get anything "approved" if you wanted.

Re: QuadRF can spot drones and see WiFi through my wall

#54

Post by dfc »

piinbinary wrote: post #48

One day I want to build something like this, except for sound. It would be great to get a heading and distance for where a sound is coming from. 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?)

Fluke has made an acoustic imager for a while now. It is used for detecting leaks:

https://www.fluke.com/en-us/product/industrial-imaging/fluke...

Re: QuadRF can spot drones and see WiFi through my wall

#55

Post by dzhiurgis »

lambda wrote: post #47
Onawa wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought I remembered even seeing public Git repos with passive radar code that ended up getting shut down due to export controls?

Yeah, Kraken SDR removed some functionality due to these concerns, if I remember correctly. 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. Ah, found discussion of what exactly it was they pulled, it was the passive radar co…

Wonder which LLM would be happy to vibe code it back (not sure if it would be able to pull it off tho).

Re: QuadRF can spot drones and see WiFi through my wall

#56

Post by tliltocatl »

Scene_Cast2 wrote: post #2

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 think it's any good for that. It's relatively narrowband and not the frequency you usually have issues with EMC on (5 to 6GHz - unless you are specially transmitting on this frequency you are unlikely to emit anything there).

Re: QuadRF can spot drones and see WiFi through my wall

#57

Post by mschuster91 »

> It sounds like they had to reverse-engineer the MIPI protocol used on the Pi 5 to do this (since it goes through the RP1 chip), and the way it's architected, you can daisy-chain multiple QuadRF modules together, letting each module calculate it's own phase shift.

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.

Re: QuadRF can spot drones and see WiFi through my wall

#58

Post by mschuster91 »

mikeweiss wrote: post #41
mlfreeman wrote: post #34

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…

Whos paying the telcos for those 5G connections and also has the FCC been degraded so much that they would allow for undeclared radios in consumer products?

> has the FCC been degraded so much that they would allow for undeclared radios in consumer products?

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.

Re: QuadRF can spot drones and see WiFi through my wall

#60

Post by mschuster91 »

rtkwe wrote: post #21
nekusar wrote: post #18

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.

The Pi alone... just today, someone over at Reddit spotted a Pi 5 being sold for 350$ [1].

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/1uso8u1/insanity/

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