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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

#181

Post by tverbeure »

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…

Are you concerned about the issue that KrakenRF ran into with their passive radar demo project violating ITAR rules, or is that something that can easily be avoided by just not doing that specific kind of application?

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

#182

Post by mrtnmcc »

tverbeure wrote: post #181
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…

Are you concerned about the issue that KrakenRF ran into with their passive radar demo project violating ITAR rules, or is that something that can easily be avoided by just not doing that specific kind of application?

We don't support passive or active radar beyond basic near-field sensing. We also proactively submitted a detailed report to the State Department earlier this year showing we don't exceed any of the USML criteria for ITAR controls. Separately we have an ECCN determination under EAR. This does rule us out from exporting to a few places (Cuba, Iran, Russia, North Korea, Syria, and some regions of Ukraine). But we are able to ship to most countries.

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

#183

Post by lazide »

varjag wrote: post #142
lazide wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lol, even baseline DJI drone chipsets from a decade ago do frequency hopping. Many baby monitors probably do too.

You can literally see the analog video links in countless thousands of published recordings. Nobody really does the hopping with analog video.

From early in the war, sure.

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

#184

Post by stevenhuang »

stevage wrote: post #174

>It can see WiFi through walls I don't understand what this is trying to say. Everyone who has ever used wi-fi knows that it works through walls. You try to connect to a wi-fi in an apartment, and there are dozens of other networks showing up. So this headline just seems...meaningless?

It's RF vision, it let's you visualize RF sources as a coloured blob overlay in real time.

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

#185

Post by bri3d »

ck2 wrote: post #51
bri3d wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Right, there are two problems there:

* Pilots are very concerned about life and safety and are heavily exposed to drone “incident” related anecdotes, so they err far on the side of caution with drone sightings. Which is to say a very low percentage of them are real.

* Poorly implemented cUAS systems, especially ones based on passive or active RF locating (radar) can actually make the problem worse: they hallucinate everything into drones, pilots hallucinate everything into drones, and now everything is a drone. This also happens frequently when people try to repurpose military systems (which are usually designed to operate in significantly less crowded environments and trigger at the slightest hint of an issue, due to mostly orthogonal-to-airports threat models people discuss at length on this thread like “dark drones”) into urban use.

This type of array based directionfinding system is cool and it could work as a small ingredient in a drone detection system, but it’s not anywhere near the state of the art in the space and most airports are probably already ahead of this to some extent.

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

#186

Post by bigiain »

mrtnmcc wrote: post #173
radicality wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Product looks cool, not sure what I’ll use it for but did just purchase it on crowdsupply :) How did you settle on that frequency range btw? It’s 4.9 - 6ghz, so it will visualize the higher freq WiFi, but I guess it will not work for the 2.4ghz WiFi, or Bluetooth which is also around that frequency? And I don’t know tooo much about RF, but would including support for that range also, have necessitated much more compl…

Thanks for the support! C-band is really the sweet spot in terms of affordability and compact size (the scale of the antennas and array spacing increases proportional to the wavelength). Maybe at some point we'll develop something at 2.4, but more devices are moving into 5GHz these days.

Is there a decent rule of thumb about how this style of antenna scales with frequency?

I'd kinda like something like this that could do 2.4GHz, 850-950MHz and even down as low as 400MHz.

Would by uneducated guess that 2.4GHz antennas would be twice the size, 900MHz about 6 times the size, and 400MHz about 10 times the size?

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

#187

Post by stagger87 »

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…

Nice project, congrats!

Rx/TX isolation?

Typical image rejection (dB)?

Does it support hardware level timestamping to align tx and rx samples through soapy?

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

#188

Post by geerlingguy »

andrewstuart2 wrote: post #146
mrtnmcc wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've got the switching noise nailed down. Fortunately the LVDS jitter doesn't affect the sigma delta too badly because that impacts proportional to baseband frequency which is largely filtered out by the decimation filters beyond 40 MHz.. With a total of eight ADCs per QuadRF, you can see we are getting huge savings by being custom! While the per-ADC ENOB is 7-8 bits, another nice thing about phased arrays is that t…

I like to think of myself as pretty well-versed when it comes to hardware and software and even some RF. But this conversation has me hitting search a lot, lol. It's fascinating reading experts talk about a domain I have less experience in.

Heh, welcome to RF; there are more rabbit holes to go down in domain specialty than I think there are grains of sand on a beach. I've gone down like... two. And I'm pretty overwhelmed.

I think that's why a lot of EEs and developers wind up getting an amateur radio license, or at least running a few fun RF projects.

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

#189

Post by geerlingguy »

mrtnmcc wrote: post #173
radicality wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Product looks cool, not sure what I’ll use it for but did just purchase it on crowdsupply :) How did you settle on that frequency range btw? It’s 4.9 - 6ghz, so it will visualize the higher freq WiFi, but I guess it will not work for the 2.4ghz WiFi, or Bluetooth which is also around that frequency? And I don’t know tooo much about RF, but would including support for that range also, have necessitated much more compl…

Thanks for the support! C-band is really the sweet spot in terms of affordability and compact size (the scale of the antennas and array spacing increases proportional to the wavelength). Maybe at some point we'll develop something at 2.4, but more devices are moving into 5GHz these days.

If you ever want to go into the KHz range, you could build a ship-scale platform to carry the antennas :D

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

#190

Post by ireflect »

bluGill wrote: post #67
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?

Telcos sell off peak only 5g for cheap. Only to large companies that are willing to work with the limits. Often it is low bandwidth.

This is interesting. Do you have any specific examples?
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