Building a Drone Tracking Radar with the ADALM-PHASER and PlutoSDR

The ADALM-PHASER is a kit designed to provide experience with phased array beamforming and radar concepts. The kit consists of a PlutoSDR, mixers, LO synthesizer, ADAR1000 beamformer chip, LNAs and array of patch antennas. It operates between 10-11 GHz, has 500 MHz BW FMCW chirps, and has 8 receive channels and 2 transmit channels. It is an open source kit that costs US$2800, and it is produced and available from Analog Devices. Currently the kit appears to not be in stock, but they note that they are working on getting more stock in soon.

The ADALM-PHASER a phased array kit for implementing radar and other phased array experiments.
The ADALM-PHASER a phased array kit for implementing radar and other phased array experiments.

Over on YouTube, Jon Kraft who appears to be affiliated with Analog Devices, is working on a series of videos that will ultimately result in a drone tracking radar being built with the ADALM-PHASER. Currently two videos have been released.

The first is an overview of radar concepts, giving an explanation of pulsed vs CW radar, and the various hardware options we have to implement low cost versions of these methods.

The second video covers more radar concepts like range resolution and shows us how to build a CW radar with the ADALM-PHASER system.

The three remaining videos are yet to be released, so keep an eye on his channel for updates.

Build Your Own Drone Tracking Radar: Part 1

Build Your Own Drone Tracking Radar: Part 2 CW Radar

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Tech Minds: Video on DJI Drone Detection on the AntSDR E200

Just recently we posted about the release of some firmware for the AntSDR E200 which allows it to decode DJI DroneID. DroneID is a protocol designed to transmit the position of the drone and operator to authorized entities such as law enforcements and operators of critical infrastructure.

In his latest video Matt from the Tech Minds YouTube channel shows this firmware in action. In the video he first shows how to install the firmware, and how to connect to its serial output. He goes on to test it with his DJI Mini 4 Pro and show some live DroneID frames being decoded.

DJI Drone Hacking Using Software Defined Radio ANTSDR E200

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An HF Ham Radio SSB/AM/FM/CW Transmitter made from a Raspberry Pi Pico and not much more

Over on Hackaday we've seen a story about a Raspberry Pi Pico based software defined radio transmitter that is capable of transmitting SSB, AM, FM and CW anywhere between 0.5 - 30 MHz.

The design generates an oscillator signal using the Pico's Programmable IO. For AM/SSB it uses the PWM output pins to generate an RF envelope which gets mixed together with the oscillator using an analog multiplexor. A small microphone is also connected to the Pico for voice transmissions. The designer notes that the output power is far too low to be used on the air, but adding an output amplifier would help.

The software is all open source and provided on GitHub, and more information about the design can be found on the designer's '101things' website.

The Raspberry Pi Pico is a low cost microcontroller board, and we note it cannot run Linux like standard Raspberry Pi boards. This means that software like RpiTX cannot be used.

Build a Ham Transmitter with a Raspberry Pi Pico

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Tech Minds: Testing the Jstvro Handheld Spectrum Analyzer

In one of his latest videos Matt from the Tech Minds YouTube channel tests out the "Jstvro" handheld spectrum analyzer which can be found on sites like Banggood and Aliexpress (the device is cheaper on Aliexpress) for about US$127.50 for the single antenna model, and US$165 for the dual antenna model including shipping. The device appears to be a clone of the RF Explorer, which is a spectrum analyzer that has been on the market for several years.

A spectrum analyzer can be used to visualize the RF spectrum and find frequencies that are active. It cannot demodulate signals like an SDR.

The Jstvro spectrum analyzer covers 240-960 MHz on the first port and 15 - 2700 MHz on the second port, with a total visible bandwidth of anywhere between 112 kHz to 600 MHz. It comes with a single color illuminated LCD screen.

In the video Matt gives an overview of the spectrum analyzer and shows it operating. He notes that the USB-C connection to the PC does not appear to be working and Matt was unable to find the PC software or firmware updates mentioned in the manual. In the rest of the video Matt demonstrates the 2.4G WiFi analyzer feature, the spectrum analyzer feature and goes over the settings.

Visualize the RF Spectrum With This Handheld Spectrum Analyzer

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SDU-X: Software Defined Data Transmission with Ultrasonic Transducers

Damian needed to get telemetry from his off-grid solar system 150 feet away, but didn't want to spin up another unreliable WiFi device. Instead he came up with a clever solution that involves using ultrasonic transducers as the physical layer of a software defined communications system instead of RF transmitters and receivers.

Having worked on RF communications systems before, Damian knew that the same  concepts apply no matter what the physical layer of communication is. His system called SDU-X uses two ultrasonic transducers mounted on 3D printed parabolic dish's to increase the directional gain, and an Arduino Nano with amplifiers and a Digital to Analog (DAC) converter for the ultrasonic transmission.

His post explains the hardware and protocol implementation, as well as explaining the Arduino code that he's released for free. The code and 3D printer models can be found on Thingiverse.

SDU-X: A software defined ultrasonic communications system.
SDU-X: A software defined ultrasonic communications system.
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DJI DroneID Detection Running on the AntSDR E200 CPU

DJI is a major manufacturer of consumer drones and their drones implement an RF protocol called DroneID which is designed to transmit the position of the drone and operator to authorized entities such as law enforcements and operators of critical infrastructure. 

Recently the AntSDR team have managed to get DJI DroneID decoding working on the AntSDR's onboard ARM processor. The decoding software runs on board the AntSDR E200 and outputs decoded data via the serial or network port. The AntSDR E200 is an SDR that is based on the AD9361 chip and has a 70 MHz to 6 GHz tuning range, 56 MHz of bandwidth and 12-bit ADC. It has 2x2 full duplex TX/RX channels and has an onboard FPGA with ARM CPU core.

They make use of existing code on GitHub from  https://github.com/proto17/dji_droneid and https://github.com/RUB-SysSec/DroneSecurity, both of which implement reverse engineered decoders for DroneID.

The update from AntSDR shows how to install the firmware onto the device and get it up an running. They note that drones that use Occusync 2 or 3 like the Mini2 or Mini3Pro work best, because other models may be encrypted or have a slightly different protocol which doesn't work with these decoders.

Aaron, creator of DragonOS has also uploaded a video showing the decoder in action.

DragonOS FocalX Decoding DJI DroneID w/ AntSDR E200 (MicroPhase)

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Modified RTL-SDR Source for SDR++ with Manual Controls for R820T/2/R828D Tuners and Harmonic Reception

Over on GitHub user Sultan-papagani has just released a modified RTL-SDR source for SDR++ that enables full manual control of the gain stages, filters and other features on R820T/2/R828D tuner based RTL-SDRs. This includes the Blog V3 and Blog V4. In the standard drivers many of these these features are automatically controlled.

Tweaking the individual LNA, Mixer and VGA gain stages manually can help you to maximize SNR, while adjusting the filters can help block out of band interference.

The modified source also enables the 'Hamonic reception' enhancement from the librtlsdr fork of rtl-sdr, which allows you to tune up to 6 GHz via harmonic mixing. Note that tuning above the standard maximum of 1.766 GHz will most likely require strong band pass filtering and an external LNA as the harmonic mode results in a lot of imaging and weak signals. 

A new RTL-SDR Source for SDR++ with Manual Gain/Filter and Harmonic Mixing Controls
A new RTL-SDR Source for SDR++ with Manual Gain/Filter and Harmonic Mixing Controls
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RFNM End of December Update

The RFNM is an upcoming software defined radio that will have eight 12-bit ADCs, up to 612 MHz real time bandwidth, and two DACs for transmitting with up to 153 MHz bandwidth.

The standard board will support tuning from 600 - 7200 MHz, with tuning expanded down to 10 MHz available via an RFFC2071A mixer daughterboard called Granita or Lime tuner daughterboard. The board also has an onboard VSPA DSP processor, as well as built in ARM CPU cores, and a 16 GFLOPS GPU all of which can help process the massive bandwidth, as that full live bandwidth will be very difficult to transfer and use on a PC.

Recently the RFNM team posted their End of December update, noting that they are currently testing revision 2 of their motherboard with revision 3 to be the production version. They also note that the Lime daughter board is ready for manufacturing, but the Granita daughterboard will be delayed until April. Everything else is estimated to be ready to ship by March.

The board has also now been redesigned to have a heatsink and fan. And they have managed to implement a Quadrature Error Correction kernel in their VSPA DSP processor. Finally, they are also drafting a plan to ship power calibrated daughterboards.

The latest rev 2 of the RFNM Motherboard
The latest rev 2 of the RFNM Motherboard
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