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QuadRF can spot drones and see WiFi through my wall
- Scene_Cast2 4mo agoI wonder if this tool can help with EMC compliance testing. My TinySA needs an LNA, so I wonder if this has the required noise floor.
- raziel2701 4mo agoI don't see any professionals turning to this for EMC/EMI testing, they already have all the test equipment for that job.
- peteforde 4mo agoThat'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.
- lambda 4mo agoI 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 looking thorugh an entire building to find unknown RF sources, or maybe a whole complex assembly like a car or aircraft.
- peteforde 4mo agoIt 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.
- varispeed 4mo agoHow about "non-professionals"? It could be useful to check device before sending for pre-compliance / compliance checks and save money - that would avoid very expensive iterations.
- lambda 4mo agoBut there are already benchtop or handheld signal analyzer for that purpose. This seems more like a tool for checking across entire large assemblies like an entire building, car, aircraft, etc, for unknown sources. If you have an individual discrete device that you're already testing, just using traditional instrumentation seems reasonable, but on a large, complex assembly, I can see it being useful. Also useful for things like detecting if a particular antenna is working without actually going up there to measure near it; if you have a MIMO setup with multiple antennas, this might make it easier to check if all of them are working correctly when mounted in inconvenient areas.
- tliltocatl 4mo agoI don't think it's any good for that. It's relatively narrowband and not the frequency you usually have issues with EMC on (5 to 6GHz - unless you are specially transmitting on this frequency you are unlikely to emit anything there).
- ck2 4mo agoif it can spot/track drones that is a marketing opportunity for airports around the world that have to deal with drone nonsense which shut down flights for days
- pixelesque 4mo agoIf would likely need to track them well (not sure from this article/video if that's the case?) to be useful in that scenario... Drawing a splodge in roughly the location (not sure if there's range info either? I doubt it if it's passive) overlaid on the video likely won't cut it...
- bri3d 4mo agoMost 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 it's the typical mis-identification or something real.
- ck2 4mo agoI'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
- bri3d 4mo agoRight, 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.
- fiatpandas 4mo agoThe visualizer app reminds me of the same UI / output you get from acoustic cameras.
- tamimio 4mo agoIt should be more specific, it spots RC drones operated on ~5.8ghz, it won’t spot RC on 900mhz, nor cellular enabled ones.
- _davide_ 4mo agofor lack of directonality?
- relaxing 4mo agofor lack of frequency tuning
- adolph 4mo agoIs that a limitation of the antenna? I though QuadRF uses SDR so can see many frequencies, not just the wifi things like ESPARGOS [0] From documentation, QuadRF: Operating frequency range of 4.9 - 6.0 GHz (C-Band). 0. https://espargos.net/ https://espargos.net/
- tamimio 4mo agoNot the antenna, unfortunately, it only operates on the range of 4.9-6ghz. It would be great to have a wider range like other SDRs but of course the cost will increase exponentially. https://www.crowdsupply.com/scale-rf/quadrf https://www.crowdsupply.com/scale-rf/quadrf
- brk 4mo agoIt also appears to have a fairly narrow detection angle. This might work for spotting a drone when you already know roughly where it is, but that problem becomes infinitely harder when you have to scan the entire sky. RF drone detection has been a challenging problem for quite a while. Lots of solid state radar/RF detection products have emerged in the space, but it is not a trivial problem. And that is for drones with active RF comms, anything flying autonomously is even harder to detect at a far enough range to actually do something about.
- 4mo ago
- kristianpaul 4mo agoAnd yet since rtl-sdr times we have passive radars as an option as well https://www.rtl-sdr.com/tag/passive-radar/ https://www.rtl-sdr.com/tag/passive-radar/
- fer 4mo agoPassive radar is fine for gigantic airliners with all regard for efficiency, none for radar cross section, and that fly above most obstacles. For drones you might be trying to scratch signal not only from below noise floor, but at the edges of quantization.
- aeturnum 4mo agoNeat! SDRs have been available at reasonable price points for some time but the processing power to engage with wifi and other digital signals has been somewhat elusive. Assuming RAM can be purchased in the future, I think we might see a lot more prosumer-targeted devices for doing raw signal analysis in the future.
- miranaproarrow 4mo agoDo you have specific SDR in mind? I thought the v2 dongle doesnt have the range of Wifi? SDR is something Ive just recently want to learn to help me understand electromagnetism
- aeturnum 4mo agoYou can look at wikipedia's list of SDRs[1] to see which can do wifi ranges now. I was more thinking about the future because you're right that it's a less common capability at the moment - but if you want a popular hobbiest platform you could check out the HackRF line[2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_software-defined_radios https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_software-defined_radio... [2] https://greatscottgadgets.com/hackrf/ https://greatscottgadgets.com/hackrf/
- AndrewKemendo 4mo ago> If the open source community can come up with something like this, just imagine what governments are capable of. Since ~2022 and accelerated by the Russian aggression against Ukraine, governments are now behind both private and open source for frontier technology. The companies that captured government contracts in the last century can’t move fast enough to bring tech into the government and national technology policy and funding is collapsing compared to the private sector That’s new in history
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- vatsachak 4mo agoOpen source is the future. If everyone can work on it, we get better results for cheaper. Open source doesn't mean the end of competition, since we are a competitive species. I think the future economy is going to be some sort of UBI + large open source projects
- NetMageSCW 4mo agoOnly if everyone wants to work on it, which seems unlikely for this project and we already know is a fail for security issues in open source.
- mmaunder 4mo agoHistorically these have been quickly shut down without much of an explanation.
- illliillll 4mo agoDo share some more details please
- random3 4mo agoPlease elaborate. There are literary step-by-step videos on how to build these. E.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3LT_b6K0Mc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3LT_b6K0Mc
- ac29 4mo agoPhased array radars are export controlled in the US. It doesnt mean its illegal to build or own, but it might be illegal to sell in some cases
- Onawa 4mo agoI thought I remembered even seeing public Git repos with passive radar code that ended up getting shut down due to export controls?
- lambda 4mo agoYeah, Kraken SDR removed some functionality due to these concerns, if I remember correctly. Odd, because export controls don't generally apply to published material (like open source software), but maybe they were worried that because they were also selling the hardware they could have issues due to the combo being export controlled. Ah, found discussion of what exactly it was they pulled, it was the passive radar code: https://www.reddit.com/r/RTLSDR/comments/yu9rei/krakenrf_pulls_passive_radar_code_from_github_due/ https://www.reddit.com/r/RTLSDR/comments/yu9rei/krakenrf_pul... And indeed, they confirmed that they believe the open source software should be OK, but they had concerns because they also sell the compatible hardware: https://nitter.net/rtlsdrblog/status/1591657740229046274 https://nitter.net/rtlsdrblog/status/1591657740229046274
- nekusar 4mo agoThe original quote for a single tile was $50-$100 They came out at $500 Being off by a bit is fine. Being off by 5x to 10x is.. Yikes.
- Catloafdev 4mo agoIt looks like it has 4 tiles on it, no?
- nekusar 4mo agoYea its mimo 2x2. Point still stands that they initially said it would be $50-$100. And its going for $500.
- rtkwe 4mo agoPrices have gone a little insane in the last year though too to be fair to them.
- mschuster91 4mo agoThe Pi alone... just today, someone over at Reddit spotted a Pi 5 being sold for 350$ [1]. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/1uso8u1/insanity/ https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/1uso8u1/insanity/
- rtkwe 4mo ago
- ericye16 4mo agoSigh, fine. I will buy another radio gadget on crowdsupply.
- mlfreeman 4mo agoThe 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 for a LONG time)
- mikeweiss 4mo agoWhos 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?
- throwaway85825 4mo agoSecret 5G is not as common because there is a huge incentive to resell the free service. Maybe with eSIM it will be harder. Kindles uses to have a free data plan SIM.
- thomashabets2 4mo ago> huge incentive to resell the free service Not all mobile data APNs go to the Internet. You can't resell an IP service that lands on an RFC1918 network with exactly one IP:port available; the API endpoint. Not saying I've seen this in devices, but I have built and run mobile data networks with private APNs.
- FuriouslyAdrift 4mo agoMore likely 4G LTE MTM (https://www.verizon.com/business/products/internet-of-things/iot-networks/lte-m-narrowband-iot/ https://www.verizon.com/business/products/internet-of-things...). It's dirt cheap and paid for by the vendor of the device it is in (usually) in the name of 'telemetry'. I've seen so many random industrial devices and parts come into our plant that have their own cellular it's wild.
- peteforde 4mo agoI was almost through the checkout flow last week before I realized that this configuration only supports a relatively narrow frequency range. I work primarily in sub-GHz radio. Please wake me up when they launch their LoRa version, that would be an instant purchase for me.
- therockspush 4mo agoset that alarm https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48861717#48864989 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48861717#48864989
- piinbinary 4mo agoOne day I want to build something like this, except for sound. It would be great to get a heading and distance for where a sound is coming from. This could be both for small scale things (e.g. which part of this is squeaking?) or large scale (e.g. is that booming noise coming from the construction a few blocks away?)
- flutas 4mo agoNot sure if you've heard of them, but they're starting to come to market with this exact thing aside from distance detection and more on the "which part is squeaking" side. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8-5lSVCR2w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8-5lSVCR2w
- dfc 4mo agoFluke has made an acoustic imager for a while now. It is used for detecting leaks: https://www.fluke.com/en-us/product/industrial-imaging/fluke-ii905 https://www.fluke.com/en-us/product/industrial-imaging/fluke...
- geerlingguy 4mo agoThere are a few knockoff options too, which are not quite as nicely calibrated, but get the job done for much less than Fluke-level prices. Like the FOTRIC TD2. I think a few people have made homebrew versions too, like this one mentioned on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45137584 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45137584
- m463 4mo agointeresting 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....
- thomashabets2 4mo ago
- slicktux 4mo agoI recall reading the original research paper from a student who made the same RF ‘camera’ here in hacker news.
- onetokeoverthe 4mo ago[dead]
- RobotToaster 4mo agoBuild this into smart glasses and it would be fascinating.
- mschuster91 4mo ago> It sounds like they had to reverse-engineer the MIPI protocol used on the Pi 5 to do this (since it goes through the RP1 chip), and the way it's architected, you can daisy-chain multiple QuadRF modules together, letting each module calculate it's own phase shift. How are they planning on distributing a shared, highly precise clock for that purpose? That's already a PITA if you do QO-100 modes that need high precision, but usually there it's enough to have one good clock that you feed to the LNA... but here? Every single one of these modules needs a very precisely identical timing signal and the kind of chips you can use to multiplex a reference clock signal are pretty expensive.
- mrtnmcc 4mo agocheck out https://QuadRF.com/docs/ https://QuadRF.com/docs/
- mschuster91 4mo agoSo, essentially, the secret sauce is tracing a known calibration source's movement to compensate for different cable lengths or weird physical tile arrangements? Neat!
- mrtnmcc 4mo agoYes-- but it's open sauce!
- fierycatnet 4mo agoI just kinda skimmed through it, so it detects drones in sky? Am I understanding this correctly? That might have some defense application considering what's going on in Eastern Europe right now.
- PaulHoule 4mo agoVery much so. I had a friend who'd just gotten out of EE school as a non-traditional student who was working for a company that was making radars for tracking drones maybe five years before the 2022 Russian invasion. That was an active system, similar in concept to the radars used in air defense system just scaled down and faster acting. The one in this article is a passive system that sees the transmitter on the drone. The comm link is the obvious weak spot on the drone as it can be detected and jammed, it is fairly inevitable that lethal attack drones that work anonymously will be widespread as a result.
- embedding-shape 4mo ago> that sees the transmitter on the drone. The comm link is the obvious weak spot on the drone Isn't most drones run by fiber optic nowadays around the front-lines though? Can't really jam those, but maybe still detect it somehow?
- RealityVoid 4mo agoAccording to CivDiv's channel about 70% of the drones used are still RC FPV drones. They are cheaper longer range and have a slightly simpler supply chain. Fiber optic cable prices have exploded because of the war.
- creaturemachine 4mo agoIf you count recon and droppers that can use distance to avoid jamming, sure. One-way applications are increasingly fibre.
- 4mo ago
- bigtech 4mo agoThis has me thinking that fiber optic drones using this technology might be able to discover the location of signal-jamming equipment. But only for the good guys.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- superkuh 4mo agoWith the end of easily available rtl-sdr dongles it's a relief to see someone has wrung such exceptional RF instantaneous bandwidth out of an RPI alternative interface. I really hope use of the camera interface for RF takes off.
- mrtnmcc 4mo agoQuadRF creator here. Happy to answer questions! We have a quick demo video as well: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QvniJk3uNyA https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QvniJk3uNyA Along with a deeper dive video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zdJ9Tbm8ALg 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 it too) The RF augmented reality is just one of many applications of this brand new 4x4 MIMO software-defined radio built from the ground up. The AR uses a web app to stream RF points that your phone/laptop browser then live-merges with your local camera in the browser. I've been obsessed with low latency and high frame rate to make it a truly AR experience. More technical details at https://QuadRF.com/ https://QuadRF.com/
- tokai 4mo agoCool project! What is the max detection range?
- mrtnmcc 4mo agoIt really depends on the transmitter strength, but if you set the Rx gain high on the QuadRF, we get within 2dB of the thermal noise detection limit.. so about as good as is possible with a receiver this size. I believe a few km is easily doable with a consumer drone but we haven't focused on it.
- stackedinserter 4mo agoThat is super cool, man. Do you have a demo for that 240 elements assembly?
- mrtnmcc 4mo agoWe should have a video about MoonRF once we finish the QuadRF mass production, look for it ~ early September! Will be legendary! You can read on how the multi-tile synchronization and calibration works here: https://QuadRF.com/docs/#phased-arrays https://QuadRF.com/docs/#phased-arrays
- Svoka 4mo agoIt is crazy for me to see super secret military tech from 30 years ago commoditized to a system cheaper than gaming console. What a time to be alive!
- fc417fc802 4mo agoI don't think it was ever (past 30 years) particularly secret? The general concept is long (100+ years) established. However pulling it off used to be exorbitantly expensive.
- noduerme 4mo agoFunny, 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-flight-att-and-ericsson-demonstrate-drone-detection-outside-of-att-stadium-302822568.html https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/the-future-takes-fl...
- Aachen 4mo ago[dead]
- quietsignal 4mo agoYep, been in the works for a while. Ericsson, Nokia Bell Labs and Qualcomm have been publishing press releases regarding ISAC and telecom providers also sees new potential market of S2aaS, especially if there is a push towards autonomous robots, vehicles that need the data for mapping & training data. Future networks using millimeter-wave (mmWave) and sub-terahertz (THz) frequencies may collect or infer detailed information about people, devices, bystanders, passive objects, and environments in a sixth-generation (6G) deployment area. It may detect breathing and heart rate of biological bodies. https://eprint.iacr.org/2026/1069 https://eprint.iacr.org/2026/1069
- greggsy 4mo agoSeems like a contender for the tricorder prize that was announced ten or so years ago might not be too far off.
- jeremyjh 4mo agoI 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.
- cucumber3732842 4mo agoRemember 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.
- llm_nerd 4mo agoWhat constraint limits this to 5 - 6Ghz? Is it the antenna? Processing? It's a really neat device, but people should realize that it has a very narrow visibility.
- KaiserPro 4mo agoAntennae, and the front end that feeds into the SDR. The lower the frequency, the bigger the antennae need to be (more or less) so a 2.4gig array would most likely be 2x the size of a 6ghz array.
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 4mo ago> If the open source community can come up with something like this, just imagine what governments are capable of. Why so bullish on government? The department of motor vehicles is capable of being better, but they aren't.
- brikym 4mo agoNow imagine thousands of these flying around in low earth orbit.
- deadcatfound 4mo ago[flagged]
- stevage 4mo ago>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?
- Barbing 4mo agoWe know the definitions of "see" and when we take it to be in the "visualize" sense, it tracks for me.
- roncesvalles 4mo agoI'm guessing if you can "see" Wifi through a wall, you can also infer some things about what's behind the wall, because the signal will have certain obstruction patterns. It becomes an xray.
- stevenhuang 4mo agoIt's RF vision, it let's you visualize RF sources as a coloured blob overlay in real time.
- wiredone 4mo agoOutside of spotting ukrainian drone operators in bunkers, why would you need or want this?
- timonoko 4mo agoI 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.
- NetMageSCW 4mo agoThat would seem to be a design flaw in the lock. It shouldn’t be trying to connect to random WiFi.
- timonoko 4mo agoI blame micropython. Because it is reprogrammed by me myself. Original was much worse, because it always asked from China if it can open the door.
- ww520 4mo agoOne use of focused RF detectors is locating hidden cameras via scanning their WiFi or Bluetooth RF signals.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- diarist_ai 4mo ago[flagged]
- swalberg 4mo agoWould something like this work at much lower frequencies? Being able to see RF at 3-30MHz would be fantastic for hunting RFI in the amateur radio HF bands.