May 5, 2016

Second Flock of Early Bird LimeSDR’s for Sale: $249 USD

The LimeSDR is a new transmit capable software defined radio with a 100 kHz – 3.8 GHz frequency range, 12-bit ADC and 61.44 MHz bandwidth which is currently seeking crowdfunding.

A few days ago the LimeSDR crowdfunding campaign went live, and within the first 32 hours all 500 of the $199 USD discounted early bird LimeSDR’s were grabbed up. Since then the crowfunding momentum has unfortunately slowed considerably. However, in an attempt to possibly revitalise the campaign LimeSDR has released a second batch of early bird units which are selling for the $50 discounted price $249 USD. They also write that people who already backed at the higher regular price of $299 USD have automatically been converted to the $249 USD price. At the time of this post there are still 427 early bird units remaining.

We think the LimeSDR has the potential to be a significantly better version of the HackRF and bladeRF which would sell for the same price or even less in the future, so please consider backing the project if an SDR like this interests you.

Their press release reads:

First, a big thank you to all our backers. With your support, we hit 20% of our campaign target in just over 24 hours and all 500 of the first flock of early bird boards were pledged within 32 hours. This is phenomenal! We have been blown away by the support and excitement from you, our community. Thank you!

Our mission is to democratise wireless innovation. Anybody should have access to this technology and be able to create innovative, game changing solutions. The level of support we have received from all of you has gone a long way to reassure us that we have made a great start in achieving our mission.

We are now confident that the LimeSDR campaign can jump start this democratisation. When we successfully reach our target and have delivered on our commitment, the work doesn’t stop there either. We will continue to work on the LimeSDR platform to improve it, together with the help of the community.

We are also working with the key players in the wireless industry and have been partnering with innovators and organizations, including EE/British Telecom, who share our vision to bring the power of open source innovation to wireless communications in a way that has never been done before.

As a result of the early success of our campaign, we are gathering further support from our manufacturers and suppliers and are now able to offer new pledge levels, including an additional flock of 500 early bird LimeSDR boards boards at a reduced price of $249. This is a significant reduction from the retail price of $299. Those who have already signed up for the $299 LimeSDR will instead pay the reduced price – your order will be amended and an updated order confirmation email will be sent to you within the next 24 hours.

We have big announcements in the pipeline, and our plan is to send you regular updates throughout the campaign. These will include exciting partnerships and new pledge levels as we see the growth of our supporters. Stay tuned!

Cheers,
Jessica and the LimeSDR Team

LimeSDR also recently released a second update that explains their driver architecture.

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May 4, 2016

Hydrogen Line Observation with an RTL-SDR

The RTL-SDR can be used for many interesting radio astronomy applications such as observing the Hydrogen line. Hydrogen atoms randomly emit photons at a wavelength of 21cm (1420.4058 MHz). Normally a single hydrogen atom will rarely emit a photon, but since space and the galaxy is filled with many hydrogen atoms the average effect is an observable RF power spike at 1420.4058 MHz. By pointing a radio telescope at the night sky and integrating the RF power over time, a power spike indicating the hydrogen line can be observed in a frequency spectrum plot.

On his website Steve Olney has been writing about his experiments and results with using an RTL-SDR to observe the hydrogen line. On his website he writes that he uses a 3M dish, with an LNA at the antenna to reduce the system NF, a hydrogen line tuned bandpass filter to remove out of band noise, 2 line amps to overcome coax loss, and finally a second LNA just before the RTL-SDR dongle to optimize the signal strength for the ADC. The dongle he uses has been modified to use a TCXO, and is aircooled via a PC fan. He also uses a modified version of the rtlsdr.exe IQ file recorder and his own custom GUI for controlling the RTL-SDR and antenna tracking mechanism.

His results show that he was able to detect the Hydrogen in the Large and Small Magellanic clouds. He also shows a method for converting the 8-bit IQ data down to 1-bit to save disk space, and shows that while some noise is added, the overall result is preserved.

See the related posts for other hydrogen line experiments with the RTL-SDR.

The 3M dish used for hydrogen line detection.

The fan cooled RTL-SDR used to detect the Hydrogen line.

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May 4, 2016

A Comparison between the RTL-SDR and SDRplay

Over on YouTube user Lan Party Hosting has uploaded a video showing a comparison between the RTL-SDR and SDRplay. In his tests he receives various HF and VHF/UHF signals and records their SNR values in a spreadsheet which can be downloaded here. The results show that as expected the SDRplay generally outperforms the RTL-SDR. However his results surprisingly show that the SNR of the RTL-SDR is usually better when the front end LNA of the SDRplay is not used, though we’re not sure if he took into account the difference in visual SNR that can be caused by using different bandwidths.

The video and measurements also explain when and why you should the Low IF mode on the SDRplay instead of the Zero IF mode to reduce signal imaging.

Watch this video on YouTube

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May 4, 2016

Using a HackRF to perform a replay attack against a Jeep Patriot

Over on his blog Caleb Madrigal has written a short article that describes how he was able to perform a simple relay attack against a Jeep Patriot vehicle which allowed him to unlock and lock his car via his HackRF. The replay attack is a very simple attack that can easily be performed with a TX capable SDR, like the HackRF. Essentially, all that is done is that a signal is recorded, and then rebroadcast (replayed) again. Normally, wireless car locks have rolling code security measures that prevent such an attack, but it appears that the 2006 Jeep Patriot has no such measures.

Caleb first recorded the unlock and lock signals using his HackRF with GNU Radio. He then took the step of opening the recorded file up in Audacity and isolating the unlock and lock audio signals, and then saving each signal to a separate file. Finally, after doing this he was able to transmit the unlock and lock waveforms which successfully locked and unlocked the Jeep.

Watch this video on YouTube

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April 29, 2016

Airspy Mini: $99 USD, 24 – 1800 MHz, 12-Bit RX SDR Now Available for Preorder

Over the last few months we’d constantly heard hints that the Airspy team was working on a miniaturized version of their popular Airspy SDR. Today the Airspy Mini has been released for preorder.

The Airspy Mini has similar high performance specifications to the Airspy R2, but comes in a USB dongle sized enclosure and only costs $99 USD – half the price of the $199 USD Airspy R2. The only difference in specification appears to be that the Airspy Mini has 6 MHz of spurious free bandwidth, versus 9 MHz in the Airspy R2, and that it lacks the external clock input and some of the expansion headers which are mainly useful only for advanced experimenters. The other features including its 24 – 1800 MHz operation, 12-bit ADC and 0.5 PPM TCXO all remain the same. The Airspy team also write that the Mini still supports a 20 MSPS mode for ADS-B decoding with the ADSBSpy decoder, which should place its ADS-B decoding performance at an identical level to the Airspy R2, which is very good.

To receive the HF frequencies the Airspy team are also releasing an Airspy Mini + SpyVerter bundle which will cost $149 USD. The SpyVerter is an upconverter designed to work with Airspy products, but has also been found to work well with the RTL-SDR.

At these prices the Airspy Mini competes heavily with the $149 USD SDRplay RSP which is a similarly specced SDR. In a previous review on this blog that compared the SDRplay RSP and Airspy R2 we found that the Airspy generally performed better in the presence of strong signals.

In the future we hope to review the Airspy Mini and check to see if its performance is similar to the Airspy R2. If its RX performance is at least the same as the R2, then it probably will be the best value SDR for those wanting to upgrade from an RTL-SDR.

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April 29, 2016

LimeSDR (Previously Sodera) Now Crowdfunding: $299 100 kHz – 3.8 GHz 12-Bit TX/RX SDR

Previously we posted news about the upcoming release of SoDeRa/LimeSDR, a low cost 100 kHz – 3.8 GHz range RX/TX capable software defined radio. Due to copyright reasons SoDeRa have renamed the product to LimeSDR.

The LimeSDR is now seeking crowdfunding and is looking for a $500,000 funding goal. At the time of this post on the first day of funding the total is already at $65,000, with 53 days left to go, so it appears that there is a high chance of it being funded. The description reads:

LimeSDR is a low cost, open source, apps-enabled (more on that later) software defined radio (SDR) platform that can be used to support just about any type of wireless communication standard. LimeSDR can send and receive UMTS, LTE, GSM, LoRa, Bluetooth, Zigbee, RFID, and Digital Broadcasting, to name but a few.

While most SDRs have remained in the domain of RF and protocol experts, LimeSDR is usable by anyone familiar with the idea of an app store – it’s the first SDR to integrate with Snappy Ubuntu Core. This means you can easily download new LimeSDR apps from developers around the world. If you’re a developer yourself, you can share and/or sell your LimeSDR apps through Snappy Ubuntu Core as well.

The LimeSDR platform gives students, inventors, and developers an intelligent and flexible device for manipulating wireless signals, so they can learn, experiment, and develop with freedom from limited functionality and expensive proprietary devices.

The price for a single board is $299 USD for regular backers, but there is an early bird price of $199 USD. At the time of this post there are still over 200 boards left to go at the lower price. There are also higher end options such that add turn-key support and acrylic and aluminium enclosures as well as a PCIe interface option.

The LimeSDR can tune from 100 kHz – 3.8 GHz, can have a bandwidth of up to 61.44 MHz, uses a 12-bit ADC, has two transmit channels, two receive channels, is full duplex and comes with a 4 PPM stable oscillator. To achieve such a high bandwidth the board requires a USB 3.0 connection, and will likely require a modern PC to reach a high bandwidth. From its pricing and specs it looks like it can be thought of a next generation HackRF, or lower cost version of the high end Ettus SDR’s.

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April 27, 2016

SDRplay Updates: Android Support, ADS-B Decoder Upgrades and Acquisition of Studio1 Software

The SDRplay team have been hard at work during the last few weeks. First they announced beta support for Android via SDRtouch, then they announced an improved ADS-B decoder, and finally they have just announced their acquisition of Studio1.

The SDRplay is a 12-bit software defined radio with tuning range between 100kHz – 2 GHz. Many consider it along with the Airspy to be the next stage up from an RTL-SDR dongle.

Android Support

The author of SDRTouch on Android recently announced support for the SDRplay. SDRTouch is a Android program similar in operation to PC based software like SDR#. To access the beta you can sign up at this link. Currently there is support for up to 2 MHz of bandwidth.

SDR Touch demo on Android device using SDRplay RSP

Watch this video on YouTube

Improved ADS-B Decoder

Back in March the SDRplay team released ADS-B decoder software for their SDR with the promise of improving its performance in the near future.

Recently the SDRplay team released an updated version of their ADS-B decoder for the Raspberry Pi which now fully utilizes the full 12-bits of the ADC and takes advantage of the full 8 MHz bandwidth. Jon, the head of marketing at SDRplay writes the following:

We now have an updated beta version of ADS-B for both the Raspberry Pi 2 and 3. This is based upon the 16bit Mutability version of dump1090 developed by Oliver Jowett and unlocks the full 12 bit performance of the RSP1. People should see a significant performance improvement over the dump1090_sdrplus version, which was based upon 8 bit code. The latest beta version can be downloaded in binary form from http://www.sdrplay.com/rpi_adsb.html . Should anyone have questions or feedback, please contact [email protected]

We plan to eventually compare the SDRplay with the Airspy and RTL-SDR on ADS-B performance. If you are interested we previously did a review of the SDRplay, Airspy and HackRF here, but as the SDRplay did not have ADS-B back then, that particular test was not done.

Acquisition of Studio1 SDR Software

The last major piece of news is that SDRplay have now acquired the Studio1 SDR software. Studio1 is a paid SDR program, similar in nature to SDR#/HDSDR/SDR-Console. Like HDSDR, Studio1 is a spinoff from the old WinRad software. Their press release reads:

SDRplay Limited has today announced that it has reached an agreement with Sandro Sfregola, (formerly CEO of SDR Applications S.a.s.) to acquire all Rights, Title and Interest in Studio 1 a leading software package for Software Defined Radio applications.

Jon Hudson, SDRplay Marketing Director said: “We are delighted to have reached this agreement with Sandro to acquire Studio 1. Studio 1 is the perfect complement to our SDR hardware products and gives us the ideal platform to deliver a complete class leading SDR solution for our customers. We look forward to working with Sandro and further developing Studio 1 to unlock the full capability of our current and future products”.

Hudson added: “Studio1 has established a strong customer base with users of many other SDR hardware products. Studio 1 will continue to be available as a stand-alone product from WoodBoxRadio http://www.woodboxradio.com/studio1.html for the foreseeable future , but we also look forward to further developing Studio 1 to specifically benefit present and future owners of our products”

Sandro Sfregola added: “I am very pleased to have reached this agreement with SDRplay. The long term future for SDR lies in complete end to end solutions and I feel the SDRplay RSP combined with Studio 1 software gives users an outstanding combination of performance and affordability”.

About Studio 1:

Studio1 was developed in Italy by SDR Applications S.a.s. and has hundreds of happy customers around the world.Studio 1 is known for its user friendly stylish GUI, CPU efficiency and advanced DSP capabilities, including features notavailable on other SDR software packages.

www.sdrapplications.it

About SDRplay:

SDRplay limited is a UK company and consists of a small group of engineers with strong connections to the UK Wireless semiconductor industry. SDRplay announced its first product, the RSP1 in August 2014

www.sdrplay.com

We believe that this is a good move for SDRplay, as one of the major issues with the RSP SDR was the lack of decently supported software.

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April 21, 2016

Receiving Iridium Satellites with a HackRF Portapack and Cheap Antenna

Recently Jared Boone, creator of the HackRF portapack posted on his blog about his experience with trying to receive Iridium satellite signals. The HackRF is 8-bit, ~0 – 6 GHz, RX/TX capable SDR, and the Portapack is a kit that allows the HackRF to go portable, by adding an LCD screen, battery pack and control wheel. Iridium is an L-band satellite service that provides products such as satellite phones and pagers. Back in December 2014 we posted how it was found that Iridium pager messages could be decoded.

To receive Iridium Jared used a simple ceramic patch antenna mounted on a piece of cheap copper clad fibreglass. This simple antenna was good enough to receive the Iridium signals with good strength. With this set up Jared was able to easily go outside and receive some packets and record them. He writes his next steps are to try and run the Iridium pager decoder on them and see what packets he captured.

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