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?
How 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.
Neat! 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.
Do 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
It 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.
> RF drone detection has been a challenging problem for quite a while.
Correct, there is no bullet proof cuas system to this date.
> anything flying autonomously is even harder to detect
Not just autonomously, because even in autonomous mode you would still need other RF like gnss, but you can fly drones without any rf signature at all and utilize a pre captured images saved on board to navigate the drone accurately using its cameras (normal or thermal). In this case, rf interference won’t work, it won’t be detected based on rf signature either, you will have to rely solely on visuals and acoustic, fly at night, and only left with acoustics.. it is a very hard task from technical standpoint.
if 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
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 it's the typical mis-identification or something real.
If 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...
There are more way advanced systems for cuas, where they infuse radar and visual and acoustic plus now AI to minimize the false positives, but practically speaking, they are not bullet proof and still fail. RID (remote ID) is a way to have a cooperative communication and was mandated in US, but there are ways too to spoof it and cloak it.
> 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
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)
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.
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.
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.
Correct, there is no bullet proof cuas system to this date.
> anything flying autonomously is even harder to detect
Not just autonomously, because even in autonomous mode you would still need other RF like gnss, but you can fly drones without any rf signature at all and utilize a pre captured images saved on board to navigate the drone accurately using its cameras (normal or thermal). In this case, rf interference won’t work, it won’t be detected based on rf signature either, you will have to rely solely on visuals and acoustic, fly at night, and only left with acoustics.. it is a very hard task from technical standpoint.
From documentation, QuadRF: Operating frequency range of 4.9 - 6.0 GHz (C-Band).
0. https://espargos.net/
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
They came out at $500
Being off by a bit is fine. Being off by 5x to 10x is.. Yikes.
Point still stands that they initially said it would be $50-$100. And its going for $500.
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.
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...
This gizmo is primarily interesting that it's pre-packaged at a price that hobbyists can afford.
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
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