[Hackrf-dev] project insights from the HackRF Team

[Gary Newell]

HackRF Team -



Thank you for the videos, lessons, and how-to guides! I am new to SDR and
I've worked my way through the lessons, tinkered with Jarad's TPMS project,
and figured out how to compile and make small modifications to
gnuradio-companion modules. I appreciate the availability of the training
materials!



I'm curious if you happen to know of an open source SDR effort that is
focused on passively painting a picture of all the electronic devices
transmitting nearby? A snapshot of my current environment? For example,
I'm currently near these cellphone towers, there are these sets of TPMS near
me, these devices are seeking wifi connections, these wifi sources are
available, these Bluetooth devices are active, and this 'thing' transmitting
unknown stuff. Totally novice question, . I see projects for particular
areas, but are you aware of one that pulls the various efforts into one
integrated 'proximity' package? I would like to participate as a great way
to learn SDR and because I think it would be a cool project to create.



Thanks in advance for the insights and pointers!



Gary





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[Kevin Reid]

I’m curious if you happen to know of an open source SDR effort that is
focused on passively painting a picture of all the electronic devices
transmitting nearby? A snapshot of my current environment? For example,
I’m currently near these cellphone towers, there are these sets of TPMS
near me, these devices are seeking wifi connections, these wifi sources are
available, these Bluetooth devices are active, and this ‘thing’
transmitting unknown stuff. Totally novice question, 
 I see projects for
particular areas, but are you aware of one that pulls the various efforts
into one integrated ‘proximity’ package?

It's a long way from actually doing this, but what you describe is part of
the long-term vision for my ShinySDR project:
https://github.com/kpreid/shinysdr

Right now, the only relevant things that it does are

- Manage multiple demodulators (either as GNU Radio blocks or as
subprocesses) and multiple hardware receivers in one application (so the
hardware can be shared, or not, among the different demodulators, as
needed).
- Displaying telemetry messages from multiple sources/protocols (e.g. I
can display both ADS-B and APRS location data on the same map).

The things that I see adding which would make it closer to what you are
looking for are:

- Built-in knowledge of “where to look” — setting up the proper
demodulators on the proper frequencies rather than expecting the user to do
so (I have "frequency databases" but those are currently set up more for
"here are all the known channels/stations, pick one" than "ADS-B is always
on 1090 MHz so you should be able to just go there implicitly when you pick
ADS-B").
- Long-term persistence of gathered information (right now it is
oriented around short timeouts for real-time tracking and has no logging).
- Background scanning — when no user is asking to look at a particular
center frequency, change frequencies to gather either specific signals or
just spectrum power density over time (as in rtl_power).
- Decoding more protocols, of course (GSM, WiFi, Bluetooth, and TPMS
aren't among the ones I've gotten to yet — I've been focused on
low-bandwidth stuff).