Are the HackRF's shipping yet?

[av8tor]

Are the HackRF's shipping yet? If no when weill they be shipping. I want to order one but it looks like the Hackshop is only taking "pre" orders.

Thanks

George

www.MilAirComms.com

[KD6W]

George,

The backers just got their boards and my guess is the factory hasn't ramped production enough to support the huge demand. The backers (I was one) were delayed over 6 months. I was expecting in Jan and took delivery when I got home from DEFCON. I have already pre-ordered my second but not holding my breath either. I did order an Ettus and it showed up (via Hungary, go figure) and that took 2 weeks. Albiet, it costs more but it has way better specifications so to me, well worth the dollars.

KD6W

[Guest spazi]

I ordered mine from another website, I should get mine in september if I'm lucky.

[Karit]

NooElec has apparently shipped their pre orders now.

They have already sent the kickstarter ones a few weeks back

[Mit0s1s]

Ossman said on kickstarter "As of today, all (post-Kickstarter) pre-orders have shipped to resellers! I expect that most resellers will be shipping individual pre-orders next week." Hopefully we see them soon, Been really anxtious to get my hands on mine!!

[Guest spazi]

Just received the confirmation mail from another vendor, the HackRF is on it's way :)

[Mit0s1s]

Got my shipping notice from HAK5 yesterday!!!

[av8tor]

I just ordered 1 yesterday. Can't wait to get it. You never can have too many radios!

George

www.MilAirComms.com <-- NSA listens to me, I listen back.

[pax0r]

please, excuse my ignorance. I can do exactly that with this new device?

- Listen to any radio conversation? (aircraft, police, ambulances, boats ..)
- And I can deal with that information? I can do DDoS radio? I can deliver?

I would like to know the possibilities of this device practical scenarios

[cooper]

If I understand it correctly, the HackRF is a Software Defined Radio with exceptional range and the ability to transmit as well as receive for a relatively very low cost.

So, complared to one of those SDR-RTL dongles which max out around the 1700MHz mark the HackRF goes to near 4GHz if I remember correctly.

Yes, you can listen in on any radio conversation, but keep in mind that the more interesting communications (emergency services and such) tend to be encrypted. You can receive the encrypted data without any problem - actually decrypting it is the hard part since you probably won't have a key and if you're very unlucky you won't even be able to determine the encryption scheme used.

Yes, it can deal with that information to some extent. Obviously, when you're receiving a 4GHz signal your radio must sample the frequency quite a bit more often than when receiving a 100MHz FM radio station. The processor on the board needs to be able to keep up, so at the lower frequencies it can for instance scan a fairly wide band of frequencies simultaneously to look for the reception sweet spot and maybe even visualise the data it received (see one of this years Toorcamp episodes of Hak5 for an example) but as you increase the frequency the effective band the device can scan without missing anything becomes narrower and narrower. Visualising the data will also be harder since there will be less CPU cycles to spare.

And yes, I do believe the thing can in fact transmit on that same range of frequencies as it can receive.

[av8tor]

What Cooper said was basically correct with a slight correction, 6GHz is the top range of the HackRF, that's if you're cpu can keep up with the sampling but I think most should.

Regarding encryption. Most Public Safety comms (here in the US) aren't encrypted however more and more cities are moving to encrypting some of their radio comms. But due to the high costs of radio systems this has been slow and some agencies are getting considerable backlash for encrypting comms.

Regarding military comms, 99% of what I hear is NOT encrypted. I hear endless military comms, both real-world and training missions and its rare they're encrypted. And the funny thing is that when do try to go encrypted it doesn't work and they'll come back non-encrypted. I have even heard NORAD fighters scrambling to intercept possible hi-jacked aircraft from Cuba, Not encrypted. AWACS directing fighters to targets, again not encrypted. Customs Board Patrol surveilling / chasing drug smuggling boats & airplanes, here it's about 50/50 encrypted or not. UHF military satellites, here nearly all are encrypted but at times you'll catch someone in the clear. All of this can be received on the HackRF, or any of the RTL-SDR dongles as well as most standard police scanners as long as they cover the 225 to 400 MHz range & can receive in AM mode.

Here is a link to tons of Military communications I've received and recorded all of which can be received on a basic scanner, dongle, or HackRF: http://milaircomms.com/audio_library.html

George

www.MilAirComms.com

[Mit0s1s]

Got mine today!! once again no sleep tonight!

[KD6W]

please, excuse my ignorance. I can do exactly that with this new device?

- Listen to any radio conversation? (aircraft, police, ambulances, boats ..)

- And I can deal with that information? I can do DDoS radio? I can deliver?

I would like to know the possibilities of this device practical scenarios

As the name would imply, you (homo sapien) define the functions or logical blocks to build up the properties you wish to define in software. If you re-arrange the blocks you can change the design to do something different like switch between AM to FM and so on. If you read through the specifications here ... https://greatscottgadgets.com/hackrf/ you can see the highlights of it's capabilities and as you can guess these are based on the silicon choices they made when they designed the unit, the rest is in the CPU you already own and your imagination. But UNLIKE a CPU the higher you go in radio frequency has no relationship with processing requirements to receive or transmit as the tuned frequency (from 10 MHz to 6 GHz in this case) is like the tuning knob on your car radio. To change the frequency, you change the Local Oscillator or more accurately, the Variable Frequency Oscillator. The amount of BANDWIDTH which can be moved through the USB interface to feed the CPU speed and to be processed will dictate where the design will choke. Since the design is rated at 20 Million samples per second using 8 bit samples for I and Q (Cosine and Sine) the device is spewing up to 320 Megabits/second or 320 Mb/s into the CPU. Any recent quad core or the new i7 can handle that without breaking a sweat. The theoretical transfer rate of USB 2.0 is 480 Mb/s so this device isn't going to over run the interface. The Ettus B210 can run twice the symbol rate of the HackRF1 but uses USB 3.0 to transfer at those rates. How fast do you need to go? Depends on how wide you are trying to capture and process or transmit.

To answer the question about DDOS - Not with a single device, but if you buy a shit load of these things and spread them around your intended target you might gain the same effect. This is about physics, not pure packets and logic and programming, it's more about wave forms and the conversion of symbols into a bit stream which are then turned into some human formed components that we can understand from transmitting AM radio to burst communication spread spectrum. Think about what a distributed denial of service attack does, now imagine how the same form would be represented using a bunch of transmitters. It's really apples and oranges. On the other hand, one guy with a powerful radio can be very disruptive to licensed services like taxi and tow companies or worse police and fire. But you must ask yourself what is the psychosis of the fucked up scum bag who would do such a thing. Seriously. Go get a Chicken Band radio and a big ass linear amp and please go knock yourself out if jamming gives you a thrill. I understand why the military uses it and its for a damn good reason, but why anybody would purposefully interfere with the people who are there to save lives just makes no sense to me. Second, who has time for this? Third, don't we have bigger problems to deal with?

If you want a REAL challenge, go outside on a night with a full moon. While looking at it, imagine if you could generate a signal strong enough and direct it at the moon and have the signal bounce off to allow YOU or somebody on the other side of the planet hear it, 2 seconds later. I will have more to follow on this subject later but I hope many of you here to get your receivers ready to do this and many more cool things (there are many folks to show you how) to point up on a night with a full moon and listen for the carriers of distant transmitters. Don't worry, the receiver is the easy part! Lots more to follow, please stay tuned. Pun intended

KD6W

Edited September 8, 2014 by KD6W

[cooper]

If you want a REAL challenge, go outside on a night with a full moon. While looking at it, imagine if you could generate a signal strong enough and direct it at the moon and have the signal bounce off to allow YOU or somebody on the other side of the planet hear it, 2 seconds later. I will have more to follow on this subject later but I hope many of you here to get your receivers ready to do this and many more cool things (there are many folks to show you how) to point up on a night with a full moon and listen for the carriers of distant transmitters. Don't worry, the receiver is the easy part! Lots more to follow, please stay tuned. Pun intended

KD6W

Gotta hand it to you, there's NOTHING wrong with either your explaining nor your pitching skills. I'm not that big into radio outside of wifi and yet I'm now pretty interested and fascinated about this concept.

[KD6W]

Check this out... physics.princeton.edu/pulsar/K1JT/wsjt.html and then look down the list of coding schemes for "JT65 or JT4 - for EME ..." where the acronym "EME" stands for Earth Moon Earth meaning, playing pool with the planets using RF. If you are closer to the Aurora belt then you can use JT6M coding. What I'm looking to do is to build these same coding schemes as modules inside GNU Radio and learn how to morph the various transforms and produce a new tool to provide an infinite range of coding terms to adapt to ANY type of condition just by changing some software variables.

KD6W

[barry99705]

I miss seeing the Auroras.