Andrew Reiter a researcher at Veracode has given a talk at the Chaos Communication Congress about building a distributed RF scanner array using cheap RTL-SDR dongles. This talk has been uploaded to YouTube.

Software-Defined Radio (SDR) has increased in popularity in recent years due to the decrease in hardware costs and increase in processing power. One example of such a class of devices is the RTL-SDR USB dongles based on the Realtek RTL2832U demodulator. This talk will discuss my experience in building a distributed RF scanner array for monitoring and spectrum mapping using such cheap SDR devices. The goal is to help the audience understand the what, why, and how of building their own RF monitoring array so that they will be able to do it themselves. In this era of increasingly being “watched”, we must be prepared to do our own “watching”.

Software-Defined Radio (SDR) has increased in popularity in recent years due to the decrease in hardware costs and increase in processing power.One example of such a class of devices is the RTL-SDR USB dongles based on the Realtek RTL2832U demodulator. This work investigates building and running an RF scanner array for monitoring and spectrum mapping using cheap SDR devices. The array allows for both RF sampling and power analysis to be split over multiple systems in order to increase capture and spectrum analysis capabilities. The system allows for “strong signal capture” as well as, simply, signal modeling with “strong signal alerting”. Also discussed will be using the array versus USRPs and the issue of antennae for all of the devices. I will explain the mistakes I made in building the array and what I did to attempt toovercome such pitfalls. The code for running the array will be introduced and released for public consumption. In addition, while we target the RTL-SDR devices, we will discuss the feasibility of including non-traditional SDR hardware in the array, including non-Realtek tuner cards and inclusion of HackRF devices.