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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

#151

Post by _trampeltier »

iamniels wrote: post #97
its_down_again wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has anyone tried acoustic imaging for water leaks inside walls? I live in a multi-floor 1900s Victorian. A leak can affect several units, and tracing the source can mean opening walls or floors in multiple places, and coordinating access has been getting harder with less WFH. Could one of these tools help map water pipe routes and trace a leak, or are they only going to be useful for air and gas leaks?

For a water leak a sound imaging device is not going to help you. You should definitely try a thermal camera. Any moisture will create small temperature differences which are easily picked up by a thermal camera.

Flir has some thermal cameras with 'special moisture' modes. In the end, wet areas are just colder.

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

#153

Post by mrtnmcc »

developer5502 wrote: post #148
mrtnmcc wrote: post #95

QuadRF creator here. Happy to answer questions! We have a quick demo video as well: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QvniJk3uNyA Along with a deeper dive video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zdJ9Tbm8ALg We didn't give Jeff great direction on camera alignment calibration or setting the radio gain but he seemed to mostly figure it out. We're improving the UI based on his suggestions (it's open source so you can customize…

Super cool project I've been following for a while. Are you pivoting away from Earth-Moon-Earth radio astronomy? I first bookmarked this project when your site was hosted at https://open.space

Yes open-space was a short-lived name: https://domainnamewire.com/2026/04/08/u-s-defense-contractor... (good story though) We finally settled on Scale RF for the company and Quad RF for the product (and Moon RF for the bigger phased arrays!). Yes that incident kind of made our brand a mess..

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

#154

Post by fer »

thomashabets2 wrote: post #132
fer wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But such a jammer is expensive and a magnet for HARMs that only need that RF signature as guidance.

Which is a completely unrelated to what we were talking about.

How is SEAD unrelated to drone warfare? Unless you believe anti radiation missiles/drones can't target jammers.

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

#155

Post by fc417fc802 »

cluckindan wrote: post #141
iamniels wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a water leak a sound imaging device is not going to help you. You should definitely try a thermal camera. Any moisture will create small temperature differences which are easily picked up by a thermal camera.

Moisture camera. Now there is an idea.

Initially I scoffed, but then I recalled that certain RF bands are disproportionately absorbed by water and this is used for certain sorts of atmospheric imaging by satellites. So you'd need a moisture "light" and an RF camera. Other than being cost prohibitive it sounds like an awesome toy.

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

#156

Post by drnick1 »

jcims wrote: post #82
mikeweiss wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

My truck (Ford) has some cell connectivity that I’ve never paid for. At scale it’s likely very inexpensive.

Unfortunately, it's used to spy on you, and insurance companies are known to buy the data to profile customers or prospective customers. The good thing about Fords is that the cell modem often has its own fuse.

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

#157

Post by fc417fc802 »

tredre3 wrote: post #100
FuriouslyAdrift wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have $100 devices in industrial devices that have them. In bulk, they cost next to nothing (not quite as cheap as RFID but getting there).

But in your scenario they are an integral and necessary part of the device, so it's costed in. In a television it's an added cost and it's unclear if serving ads really can offset that extra $25-100 of hardware (and included data) you ship on a $200-1000 television. It's also unclear to me if the low data packages they come with would be enough to serve meaningful ads to begin with. Those devices usually come with a…

Why are you assuming the primary motivator is to serve ads? Smart TVs were already caught running content ID against the contents of the screen and phoning that data home. "Routing at the edge" is the euphemism for the logical extension of that.

> extra $25-100

Your estimated costs are off by at least one order of magnitude, probably two.

Of course none of this makes much sense in a world where smart TVs have ubiquitous wifi, most consumers have one, most consumers run the stock OS, and most consumers connect it to the public internet. It would be entirely viable if not for that status quo.

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

#158

Post by drnick1 »

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…

> I have heard claims of devices (mostly TVs) supposedly coming with secret 5G cell uplinks built

This is occasionally mentioned on HN, but I have not yet seen a specific instance of this. Please share if you know something about secret 5G cell modems used to spy on people.

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

#160

Post by peteforde »

lambda wrote: post #44
peteforde wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think that for a single device, this probably wouldn't help much over just having a more traditional signal analyzer, either benchtop or handheld. If you know what you're testing, just using a signal analyzer around it will give you a good first pass picture of emissions, and probably be much more informative and precise than this. This seems more useful for finding unknown or hidden RF sources, for instance lookin…

It is surreal to me that a comment stating that being able to do a certification pre-check on site before booking testing got downvoted.

Sure, maybe this isn't the device for that... but the idea that what I said was objectionable is just bizarre.

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