Live data from Hacker News

New quantum receiver the first to detect entire radio frequency spectrum

phys.org

21–30 of 79 posts

Re: New quantum receiver the first to detect entire radio frequency spectrum

#21
What sort of exotic signal processing solution would be required to support 20GHz of bandwidth at any useful sampling rate and bit depth? How would you actually collect a meaningful amount of information from every station in range simultaneously?

I feel like this is something that may be possible in physics, but is not well supported in practical applicability. The amount of signal processing hardware required to support this in the field should be a deal breaker with modern hardware, unless there are some really strong constraints regarding the bands & modulation schemes actually being monitored simultaneously.

Assume 40GHz sample rate for bare minimum no aliasing over the 20GHz spectrum, 8 bits per sample. You will wind up with ~320Gbps of data to deal with.

Re: New quantum receiver the first to detect entire radio frequency spectrum

#23
post #21

What sort of exotic signal processing solution would be required to support 20GHz of bandwidth at any useful sampling rate and bit depth? How would you actually collect a meaningful amount of information from every station in range simultaneously? I feel like this is something that may be possible in physics, but is not well supported in practical applicability. The amount of signal processing hardware required to su…

A quantum signal processor of course!

It is however 5-10 years away.

Re: New quantum receiver the first to detect entire radio frequency spectrum

#25
post #21

What sort of exotic signal processing solution would be required to support 20GHz of bandwidth at any useful sampling rate and bit depth? How would you actually collect a meaningful amount of information from every station in range simultaneously? I feel like this is something that may be possible in physics, but is not well supported in practical applicability. The amount of signal processing hardware required to su…

"hold my beer" -- CERN

https://hackaday.com/2020/05/14/crunching-giant-data-from-th...

Re: New quantum receiver the first to detect entire radio frequency spectrum

#26

Does anyone have insight into why this is published in the open literature, if it is such a militarily-exploitable advance?

i dont think we have any enemies questioning whether or not we listen to radio frequencies?

Yup. The cool thing is that it's an all-in-one system. I'm not sure there's a huge strategic advantage in knowing whether someone has one mega-radio or a bunch of separate modules glued together.

Plus, I linked to the preprint above. It's ten pages long--you're not going to be able to build your own based on it; it's more just documentation that the thing exists.

Re: New quantum receiver the first to detect entire radio frequency spectrum

#27
post #21

What sort of exotic signal processing solution would be required to support 20GHz of bandwidth at any useful sampling rate and bit depth? How would you actually collect a meaningful amount of information from every station in range simultaneously? I feel like this is something that may be possible in physics, but is not well supported in practical applicability. The amount of signal processing hardware required to su…

Ask Keysight

https://www.keysight.com/en/pdx-2935683-pn-UXR0802A/infiniiu...

That said most signal processing scopes at high frequencies are analogue, so you are dealing with Giga Samples / Second not bps. But yes to to make sense of the actual data it would require some serious networking and storage but that might not be necessary for many applications.

Re: New quantum receiver the first to detect entire radio frequency spectrum

#28
post #21

What sort of exotic signal processing solution would be required to support 20GHz of bandwidth at any useful sampling rate and bit depth? How would you actually collect a meaningful amount of information from every station in range simultaneously? I feel like this is something that may be possible in physics, but is not well supported in practical applicability. The amount of signal processing hardware required to su…

The main application would seem to be no longer needing to scan the spectrum for activity... you'd continuously be scanning (effectively) all of it simultaneously. A least one useful bit information you'd be obtaining from this is simply where in the spectrum activity is occurring.

Re: New quantum receiver the first to detect entire radio frequency spectrum

#30
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even so, this is pretty impressive, not all that long ago this device would be SF and people would doubt it would ever exist.

Not that long ago, the radios in a cell phone would be SF.

Indeed!

The antenna in mobile phones perform well across a wide range of frequencies due to being fractals!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal_antenna

Post reply on HN