Using an RTL-SDR to help open a Gated Community
Tomasz lives in a gated community, but as he doesn’t own a car he wasn’t given access to a gate remote control. This made it difficult for him to have friends who have cars visit him. So he decided to use an RTL-SDR to receive, capture, analyze the gate signal which is transmitted at 433 MHz and then copy the signal to use with his own homemade transmitter.
First Tomasz used his RTL-SDR with SDR# to capture a few sound files of the gate remote which transmits at 433 MHz. Then he viewed the sound waveform’s in Audacity, a free audio editing program. Just by looking at the waveform he was able to determine that the signal was On-Off Key (OOK) modulated and that each frame of the transmission was the same, meaning that no security scheme was used.
Next he wrote down the transmission parameters that he learned from his analysis and built a simple 433 MHz transmitter which he connected to a microcontroller. After programming his microcontroller to send a copied signal he was able to open the gate.