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QuadRF can spot drones and see WiFi through my wall

jeffgeerling.com

211–220 of 249 posts

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

#211
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brute force wide band jamming would be easy too and would make hopping ineffective. Unless drones use self tuning antennas to overcome losses, they can't hop too far away from the antenna resonance frequency, which makes jammers job easier.

Jamming broadband is a lot more energy expense than frequency hopping. Orders of magnitude.

True, but they can't use directional antennas nor lots of power, and once they're far enough from the transmitter inverse square law does the rest. Ground stations always have an advantage because of higher gain antennas and more power available.

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

#212

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.

My feel would be that 2.4 has the advantage of being much longer range and there are plenty of sources for 2.4 - if you wanted to look at back-scatter and not just sources of emission. The primary demo of this piece of equipment is looking at radiation sources, but as you guys show there are plenty of other possible applications. I feel like since 2.4Ghz stuff has been around for ages.. the stuff should be much cheaper? Just a guess though :) Would be curious to know what the reality looks like

And cool to see you guys are from Santa Barbara. Lots of relevant talent there :)

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

#213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if I put two of these far-ish apart, can I get better 3d/4d data?

of course? not working directly together maybe, but put them at right angles and you get depth without relying on signal amplitude analysis. did I misunderstand the question?

Something like this: https://youtu.be/YZkLQsv3huo

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

#214

Funny, in the "imagine what governments are capable of" vein, I just read this[0] a few minutes ago before coming over to HN to find this post trending. [0] https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/the-future-takes-fl...

I have a feeling they are not planning to sell it to government agencies for $500. Our tax dollars will go a lot less far I expect.

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

#215
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…

What distance of drone detection would this theoretically have?

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

#216

Funny, in the "imagine what governments are capable of" vein, I just read this[0] a few minutes ago before coming over to HN to find this post trending. [0] https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/the-future-takes-fl...

Remember how for years starting in the late teens and fizzling out over covid university paper after university paper about "this is so cool look how we can see through walls by essentially using 5g and wifi as ambient light" and they steadily marched up the chain from simple room layouts to furniture layouts, occupant detection, occupant movement and then started being dressed up with the usual dogwhistle language about "emergency services" that people who are building tech to help infantry/police entry teams use to make it seem more noble and then after that it all just kinda stopped being publicized with any sort of regularity?

I'm not a conspiracy theorist but I'd say all the people working on that shit got hired.

Sorry not sorry for the run on sentence.

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

#217
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…

Really cool! Just ordered one. Do you guys have an active lab in SB?

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

#219

Outside of spotting ukrainian drone operators in bunkers, why would you need or want this?

I want this. I have Wifi door lock too far away from base station. It was often stuck in a loop trying to connect to neighbours' Wifis. By try and error I managed to block those using metal foil, but it was hard work.

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

#220
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

interesting on amazon: fluke $25k flir $10k td2 $1k These are the kinds of things you look at and think - maybe I DO need night-vision, or a soldering iron with a cpu, or a thermal imager, or a steerable endoscope or now an acoustic imager....

If you own your home I'd say you need a thermal imager. Just the ability to diagnose clogged pipes is priceless. https://x.com/ThermoInstagram/status/909356506059026432 Also for checking if microwaved food is ready.

Can also be used for looking at heat leaking into or out of your house via conduction, which can help you determine where there might be more insulation needed, or maybe a particular wall needs more shade in summer.
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