Who’s following me on Twitter probably knows some details. I believe this is my most expected article. Last year I came up with the idea to build a wideband SDR. It’s fun to monitor a wider spectrum and some signals. Sure, USRP is cool but too expensive for amateur usage. I had a few HackRF boards, so I ordered more…
Tag: radio
Hacking Bluetooth speaker/FM radio firmware
I have a little Bluetooth speaker/FM radio in my kitchen. This speaker is not perfect but nice for its price. Except for few annoying things regarding sound notifications. I decided to “fix” that issues. Here I’m showing how it was done. A little bit of reverse engineering was involved.
Small satellite dish with rotator
Receiving and analyzing radio signals is fun. Receiving satellite signal is even better. A few years ago, I had a nice 3m satellite dish with a hydrogen line receiver. Now I have only a small balcony with limited antennas placement ability. I decided to build a custom 40 cm dish with a servo-based rotator. Sure, it’s impossible to receive weak…
Reworking linear polarization satellite LNB into a circular polarized
In this article, I want to discuss different types of satellite LNB, polarization, and depolarization of waves. Also, I’ll show how to rework the LNB. Also, we will discuss a theory to figure out why this rework is working. The primary topic here is Ku-band LNB, but all this also works for the Ka-band and C-band.
Combining two HackRF SDR to see more
HackRF One is a popular SDR transceiver and a really nice piece of hardware. For a reasonable price, you can get fully open hardware to monitor radio signals in a wide range (20MHz – 6GHz, but really up to 7GHz). Boards support external clocking and can be easily customized. I believe there is only one concern about this board is…
Listening to aircrafts and receiving images from the satellites
In the previous article, we discussed how to calculate and build a simple Yagi-Uda antenna. Now it’s time to play with this antenna and receive some interesting signals.
144 MHz Yagi-Uda antenna
Yagi–Uda antenna is a directional and pretty effective antenna consisting of multiple parallel elements in a line, usually half-wave dipoles made of metal rods. The Best-known use of this type of antenna is as rooftop terrestrial television antennas, but it is also used for point-to-point fixed communication links and long-distance shortwave communication by shortwave broadcasting stations and radio amateurs. This…