QuadRF can spot drones and see WiFi through my wall

https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2026/quadrf-can-spot-drones-and-see-wifi-through-my-wall/

by speckx • 12 days ago

754 237 12 days ago

I wonder if this tool can help with EMC compliance testing. My TinySA needs an LNA, so I wonder if this has the required noise floor.

raziel2701• 12 days ago

I don't see any professionals turning to this for EMC/EMI testing, they already have all the test equipment for that job.

peteforde3• 12 days ago

That's absolutely missing the point. EMC/EMI testing is expensive, time consuming and requires scheduling and experiment design.

Being able to do local soft-run testing on-site to be sure that you eliminate the easy 90% of issues before you get to the lab would be a huge win.

varispeed• 12 days ago

How about "non-professionals"? It could be useful to check device before sending for pre-compliance / compliance checks and save money - that would avoid very expensive iterations.

tliltocatl• 12 days ago

I don't think it's any good for that. It's relatively narrowband and not the frequency you usually have issues with EMC on (5 to 6GHz - unless you are specially transmitting on this frequency you are unlikely to emit anything there).

ck22• 12 days ago

if it can spot/track drones that is a marketing opportunity for airports around the world that have to deal with drone nonsense which shut down flights for days

pixelesque• 12 days ago

If would likely need to track them well (not sure from this article/video if that's the case?) to be useful in that scenario...

Drawing a splodge in roughly the location (not sure if there's range info either? I doubt it if it's passive) overlaid on the video likely won't cut it...

bri3d2• 12 days ago

Most major airports will already have a counter-UAS system, it's a huge industry.

One big issue with radar is that it has the same problem pilots and human observers do: it struggles to distinguish drones from anything else in the sky (birds, balloons, planes, etc.). This is an active and improving research space, but by and large with radar, when your pilots report a drone, you still don't know how to figure out if it's the typical mis-identification or something real.

ck22• 12 days ago

I'm reading about pilots spotting drones during takeoff/landing that the airport didn't know about

And I've read about airport shutdowns in UK and US without a single arrest which is why it keeps happening

So whatever system exists, apparently not good enough

tamimio5• 12 days ago

There are more way advanced systems for cuas, where they infuse radar and visual and acoustic plus now AI to minimize the false positives, but practically speaking, they are not bullet proof and still fail. RID (remote ID) is a way to have a cooperative communication and was mandated in US, but there are ways too to spoof it and cloak it.

somehnguy• 12 days ago

Yeah RemoteID is trivial to spoof using an ESP32. Most hobby pilots I know simply don't comply with RemoteID. And bad actors certainly won't purchase a $75 device to add to their drone.

It does become a bit more difficult with consumer grade off the shelf drones because it's built in. Still defeatable by the determined of course.

nradov• 12 days ago

Yes, primary radar has been useful for detecting airspace incursions since 1939. Nothing new here.

knorker2• 12 days ago

The difference with this kind of tech, though, is tracking down the operator.

ThrowawayR2• 12 days ago

Phased array antennas (in use since the 1960s) and AESA (in use since the 1990s) are very mature tech that RF engineers are well aware of.

This gizmo is primarily interesting that it's pre-packaged at a price that hobbyists can afford.

btbuildem• 12 days ago

Only the ones that use radio for control. The fiberoptic ones are "dark" to this setup.

fiatpandas• 12 days ago

The visualizer app reminds me of the same UI / output you get from acoustic cameras.

tamimio5• 12 days ago

It should be more specific, it spots RC drones operated on ~5.8ghz, it won’t spot RC on 900mhz, nor cellular enabled ones.

_davide_• 12 days ago

for lack of directonality?

relaxing• 12 days ago

for lack of frequency tuning

adolph• 12 days ago

Is that a limitation of the antenna? I though QuadRF uses SDR so can see many frequencies, not just the wifi things like ESPARGOS [0]

From documentation, QuadRF: Operating frequency range of 4.9 - 6.0 GHz (C-Band).

0. https://espargos.net/

tamimio5• 12 days ago

Not the antenna, unfortunately, it only operates on the range of 4.9-6ghz.

It would be great to have a wider range like other SDRs but of course the cost will increase exponentially.

https://www.crowdsupply.com/scale-rf/quadrf

brk• 12 days ago

It also appears to have a fairly narrow detection angle. This might work for spotting a drone when you already know roughly where it is, but that problem becomes infinitely harder when you have to scan the entire sky.

RF drone detection has been a challenging problem for quite a while. Lots of solid state radar/RF detection products have emerged in the space, but it is not a trivial problem. And that is for drones with active RF comms, anything flying autonomously is even harder to detect at a far enough range to actually do something about.

tamimio5• 12 days ago

RF drone detection has been a challenging problem for quite a while.

Correct, there is no bullet proof cuas system to this date.

anything flying autonomously is even harder to detect

Not just autonomously, because even in autonomous mode you would still need other RF like gnss, but you can fly drones without any rf signature at all and utilize a pre captured images saved on board to navigate the drone accurately using its cameras (normal or thermal). In this case, rf interference won’t work, it won’t be detected based on rf signature either, you will have to rely solely on visuals and acoustic, fly at night, and only left with acoustics.. it is a very hard task from technical standpoint.

nullpxl• 11 days ago

I'm not super familiar with this area, but couldn't it see harmonics?

kristianpaul• 12 days ago

And yet since rtl-sdr times we have passive radars as an option as well https://www.rtl-sdr.com/tag/passive-radar/

fer3• 12 days ago

Passive radar is fine for gigantic airliners with all regard for efficiency, none for radar cross section, and that fly above most obstacles. For drones you might be trying to scratch signal not only from below noise floor, but at the edges of quantization.

aeturnum2• 12 days ago

Neat! SDRs have been available at reasonable price points for some time but the processing power to engage with wifi and other digital signals has been somewhat elusive. Assuming RAM can be purchased in the future, I think we might see a lot more prosumer-targeted devices for doing raw signal analysis in the future.

miranaproarrow• 12 days ago

Do you have specific SDR in mind? I thought the v2 dongle doesnt have the range of Wifi? SDR is something Ive just recently want to learn to help me understand electromagnetism

aeturnum2• 9 days ago

You can look at wikipedia's list of SDRs[1] to see which can do wifi ranges now. I was more thinking about the future because you're right that it's a less common capability at the moment - but if you want a popular hobbiest platform you could check out the HackRF line[2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_software-defined_radio...

[2] https://greatscottgadgets.com/hackrf/

AndrewKemendo• 12 days ago

If the open source community can come up with something like this, just imagine what governments are capable of.

Since ~2022 and accelerated by the Russian aggression against Ukraine, governments are now behind both private and open source for frontier technology.

The companies that captured government contracts in the last century can’t move fast enough to bring tech into the government and national technology policy and funding is collapsing compared to the private sector

That’s new in history

vatsachak• 12 days ago

Open source is the future. If everyone can work on it, we get better results for cheaper.

Open source doesn't mean the end of competition, since we are a competitive species.

I think the future economy is going to be some sort of UBI + large open source projects

NetMageSCW4• 11 days ago

Only if everyone wants to work on it, which seems unlikely for this project and we already know is a fail for security issues in open source.

mmaunder• 12 days ago

Historically these have been quickly shut down without much of an explanation.

illliillll• 12 days ago

Do share some more details please

random3• 12 days ago

Please elaborate. There are literary step-by-step videos on how to build these. E.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3LT_b6K0Mc

ac29• 12 days ago

Phased array radars are export controlled in the US. It doesnt mean its illegal to build or own, but it might be illegal to sell in some cases

knorker2• 12 days ago

The explanation may be spelled ITAR.

jkuli2• 12 days ago

The covered materials are very broad, though often limited to equipment built "for purposes of", like in this section.

Title 22 Chapter I Subchapter M Part 121 - The United States Munitions List - Category XI Paragraph b

Electronic systems, equipment or software, not elsewhere enumerated in this subchapter, specially designed for intelligence purposes that collect, survey, monitor, or exploit, or analyze and produce information from, the electromagnetic spectrum (regardless of transmission medium), or for counteracting such activities.

jkuli2• 12 days ago

At what point does a microphone become an intelligence device, when we have so many types of microphones. Is it an arbitrary label I can add or remove to a product? Will it apply equally to large manufacturers?

go_artemis2• 12 days ago

specifically designed to collect or analyze information from the electromagnetic spectrum

Wouldn't that apply to every spectrum analyzer?

cucumber37328422• 11 days ago

Probably because the people working on them get job offers that come with clauses about not working on this stuff publicly.

nekusar2• 12 days ago

The original quote for a single tile was $50-$100

They came out at $500

Being off by a bit is fine. Being off by 5x to 10x is.. Yikes.

Catloafdev• 12 days ago

It looks like it has 4 tiles on it, no?

nekusar2• 12 days ago

Yea its mimo 2x2.

Point still stands that they initially said it would be $50-$100. And its going for $500.

rtkwe3• 12 days ago

Prices have gone a little insane in the last year though too to be fair to them.

mschuster914• 12 days ago

The Pi alone... just today, someone over at Reddit spotted a Pi 5 being sold for 350$ [1].

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/1uso8u1/insanity/

go_artemis2• 12 days ago

It's actually sold on their Crowd Supply for $99 per 4-antenna RF tile, just as the said on their website.

See the 6-pack: https://www.crowdsupply.com/scale-rf/quadrf#products

aeonik• 12 days ago

$500 is a surprisingly good price for a 4x4 mimo SDR.

ericye162• 12 days ago

Sigh, fine. I will buy another radio gadget on crowdsupply.

mlfreeman• 12 days ago

The visualizer reminds me of my thermal camera.

I have heard claims of devices (mostly TVs) supposedly coming with secret 5G cell uplinks built in [never heard a specific model mentioned though].

If there were more variants covering more commonly-used RF bands, people could walk around and literally check for once.

(incidentally i'm sure three letter agencies have had this sort of tech in their bug-detecting toolkit for a LONG time)

mikeweiss3• 12 days ago

Whos paying the telcos for those 5G connections and also has the FCC been degraded so much that they would allow for undeclared radios in consumer products?

throwaway85825• 12 days ago

Secret 5G is not as common because there is a huge incentive to resell the free service. Maybe with eSIM it will be harder. Kindles uses to have a free data plan SIM.

FuriouslyAdrift2• 12 days ago

More likely 4G LTE MTM (https://www.verizon.com/business/products/internet-of-things...). It's dirt cheap and paid for by the vendor of the device it is in (usually) in the name of 'telemetry'.

I've seen so many random industrial devices and parts come into our plant that have their own cellular it's wild.

ethin• 12 days ago

The FCC is literally powerless nowadays for all intents and purposes. They've abrogated so much of their authority to the states now that they might as well be eliminated. What little authority that remains with it is bought and paid for to the point that I'm sure you could get anything "approved" if you wanted.

mschuster914• 12 days ago

has the FCC been degraded so much that they would allow for undeclared radios in consumer products?

Well... most TVs already have a WiFi/BT chipset for stuff like advertisements or, especially with Apple, high-bandwidth video streaming. There is already a radio module present, but (IIRC) you don't have to disclose what exactly that module is capable of.

bluGill3• 12 days ago

Telcos sell off peak only 5g for cheap. Only to large companies that are willing to work with the limits. Often it is low bandwidth.

jcims• 12 days ago

My truck (Ford) has some cell connectivity that I’ve never paid for. At scale it’s likely very inexpensive.

drnick13• 12 days ago

I have heard claims of devices (mostly TVs) supposedly coming with secret 5G cell uplinks built

This is occasionally mentioned on HN, but I have not yet seen a specific instance of this. Please share if you know something about secret 5G cell modems used to spy on people.

MomsAVoxell• 12 days ago

It always impresses me that technology ideas once exposed in the nefarious background of the Snowden revelations, has now become mainstream, almost passé among the technocratie, but then I remember that there is a very dominant event horizon where all technology is weaponized/de-weaponized according to the intentions of its users..

It's going to been pretty wild to see QuadRF being applied for things. I can only imagine there are weapons-technologists who will bolt this onto hunter/killer drones at some point. A lynchpin technology for the inevitable drone wars.

peteforde3• 12 days ago

I was almost through the checkout flow last week before I realized that this configuration only supports a relatively narrow frequency range.

I work primarily in sub-GHz radio. Please wake me up when they launch their LoRa version, that would be an instant purchase for me.

therockspush• 12 days ago

set that alarm

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48861717#48864989

piinbinary2• 12 days ago

One day I want to build something like this, except for sound. It would be great to get a heading and distance for where a sound is coming from.

This could be both for small scale things (e.g. which part of this is squeaking?) or large scale (e.g. is that booming noise coming from the construction a few blocks away?)

flutas• 12 days ago

Not sure if you've heard of them, but they're starting to come to market with this exact thing aside from distance detection and more on the "which part is squeaking" side.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8-5lSVCR2w

dfc• 12 days ago

Fluke has made an acoustic imager for a while now. It is used for detecting leaks:

https://www.fluke.com/en-us/product/industrial-imaging/fluke...

geerlingguy3• 12 days ago

There are a few knockoff options too, which are not quite as nicely calibrated, but get the job done for much less than Fluke-level prices. Like the FOTRIC TD2.

I think a few people have made homebrew versions too, like this one mentioned on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45137584

its_down_again• 12 days ago

Has anyone tried acoustic imaging for water leaks inside walls? I live in a multi-floor 1900s Victorian. A leak can affect several units, and tracing the source can mean opening walls or floors in multiple places, and coordinating access has been getting harder with less WFH.

Could one of these tools help map water pipe routes and trace a leak, or are they only going to be useful for air and gas leaks?

cenamus• 12 days ago

I think you'll be very interested in this awesome project

https://ribbonfarm.com/2016/06/29/the-daredevil-camera/

tzs• 12 days ago

Like in this Steve Mould video, "Acoustic cameras can SEE sound" [1]?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtMTvsi-4Hw

Torkel• 12 days ago

There are products in this space, eg https://www.crysound.com/

Very cool stuff, can be used for drone detection at up to 200m. Accuracy is not super good, unless you make mic spacing a bit large.

simplyalec• 12 days ago

I've seen http://soundryx.com/

hinkley3• 12 days ago

The army has one of these for sniper triangulation, and Boeing made a civilian version for optimizing sound dampening on the 787. I don’t know if they kept doing that on subsequent planes but I would expect so given how enthusiastic they were about being able to apply the weight budget to greater effect.

You need really high clock rate sensing to differentiate the arrival time for sound from microphone arrays where they are all less than a nanosecond separated from each other.

a_paddy• 12 days ago

Given that it was McDonnell Douglas, sorry Boeing, they probably cut it.

azalemeth• 12 days ago

A nanosecond? The speed of sound at sea level in dry air is approximately 330m/s. So at say 3.3 kHz, the rough logarithmic middle of the audible spectrum, K=2π/lambda is 2π/0.1 m=20 π rad/m. A phase difference from a source difference k. ∆r would therefore likely be far more easily resolved than that for many physical ∆rs then, no?

piinbinary2• 12 days ago

ChatGPT tells me that it would take a very large array to detect distance with any accuracy

mrtnmcc15• 12 days ago

Realtime sound visualization was actually a project I did 20 years ago as a freshman and that (probably?) inspired me to build this AR app in QuadRF.

On balance, I would say this RF version was 200x harder.

wyager• 12 days ago

There's a company in Austin that uses sound for drone localization, although I forget the name

wkjagt• 12 days ago

Steve Mould did a cool video on this: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QtMTvsi-4Hw

lowbloodsugar• 12 days ago

I want that but for smell.

NopIdoN• 12 days ago

You could try training wasps.

amelius• 11 days ago

Nobody can do that. Use dogs.

tenuousemphasis• 12 days ago

You should visit Orfield Labs in Minnesota.

KaiserPro4• 12 days ago

respeaker and https://github.com/introlab/odas might be a good starting point without having to make hardware.

Making the hardware is fairly achievable without having to do fancy things. but if you want >8 channels you'll need to make some custom interface hardware.

slicktux• 12 days ago

I recall reading the original research paper from a student who made the same RF ‘camera’ here in hacker news.

mschuster914• 12 days ago

It sounds like they had to reverse-engineer the MIPI protocol used on the Pi 5 to do this (since it goes through the RP1 chip), and the way it's architected, you can daisy-chain multiple QuadRF modules together, letting each module calculate it's own phase shift.

How are they planning on distributing a shared, highly precise clock for that purpose? That's already a PITA if you do QO-100 modes that need high precision, but usually there it's enough to have one good clock that you feed to the LNA... but here? Every single one of these modules needs a very precisely identical timing signal and the kind of chips you can use to multiplex a reference clock signal are pretty expensive.

mrtnmcc15• 12 days ago

check out https://QuadRF.com/docs/

mschuster914• 12 days ago

So, essentially, the secret sauce is tracing a known calibration source's movement to compensate for different cable lengths or weird physical tile arrangements? Neat!

RobotToaster• 12 days ago

Build this into smart glasses and it would be fascinating.

fierycatnet• 12 days ago

I just kinda skimmed through it, so it detects drones in sky? Am I understanding this correctly? That might have some defense application considering what's going on in Eastern Europe right now.

PaulHoule• 12 days ago

Very much so.

I had a friend who'd just gotten out of EE school as a non-traditional student who was working for a company that was making radars for tracking drones maybe five years before the 2022 Russian invasion.

That was an active system, similar in concept to the radars used in air defense system just scaled down and faster acting.

The one in this article is a passive system that sees the transmitter on the drone. The comm link is the obvious weak spot on the drone as it can be detected and jammed, it is fairly inevitable that lethal attack drones that work anonymously will be widespread as a result.

embedding-shape• 12 days ago

that sees the transmitter on the drone. The comm link is the obvious weak spot on the drone

Isn't most drones run by fiber optic nowadays around the front-lines though? Can't really jam those, but maybe still detect it somehow?

TrackerFF• 12 days ago

It detects drones which send out RF signals at the same frequency band. Most drones used in Ukraine are tethered with thin optical wire exactly because one of the first anti-drone measures was to simply jam them at the frequencies the operators used.

There are some more advanced anti-drone measures at work: Like blasting them with directed high-energy microwaves to destroy the circuits.

euroderf• 12 days ago

Frequency hopping is not THAT difficult.

idiotsecant• 12 days ago

Most drones aren't optical because optical drones sacrifice payload and distance, they're only used when broad spectrum jamming is expected. Jamming of that type is expensive and heavy enough that infantry probably won't be jamming, or light vehicles, or a lot of infrastructure.

shakow3• 12 days ago

That might have some defense application considering what's going on in Eastern Europe right now.

This is a bog-standard phased-array RDF calibrated for WiFi freqs; that stuff is already in every single defense show.

Also, that's why there's jamming everywhere (to blind that kind of things) and why many UAVs are now tethered to optical fibers instead of being RF-controlled.

IshKebab2• 12 days ago

Yeah I think it is at every defense show, but that doesn't mean it makes it to the front lines. Defense show = super expensive. This is cheap.

bigtech• 12 days ago

This has me thinking that fiber optic drones using this technology might be able to discover the location of signal-jamming equipment. But only for the good guys.

superkuh• 12 days ago

With the end of easily available rtl-sdr dongles it's a relief to see someone has wrung such exceptional RF instantaneous bandwidth out of an RPI alternative interface. I really hope use of the camera interface for RF takes off.

mrtnmcc15• 12 days ago

QuadRF creator here. Happy to answer questions!

We have a quick demo video as well: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QvniJk3uNyA

Along with a deeper dive video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zdJ9Tbm8ALg

We didn't give Jeff great direction on camera alignment calibration or setting the radio gain but he seemed to mostly figure it out. We're improving the UI based on his suggestions (it's open source so you can customize it too)

The RF augmented reality is just one of many applications of this brand new 4x4 MIMO software-defined radio built from the ground up. The AR uses a web app to stream RF points that your phone/laptop browser then live-merges with your local camera in the browser. I've been obsessed with low latency and high frame rate to make it a truly AR experience. More technical details at https://QuadRF.com/

tokai• 12 days ago

Cool project! What is the max detection range?

mrtnmcc15• 12 days ago

It really depends on the transmitter strength, but if you set the Rx gain high on the QuadRF, we get within 2dB of the thermal noise detection limit.. so about as good as is possible with a receiver this size. I believe a few km is easily doable with a consumer drone but we haven't focused on it.

stackedinserter• 12 days ago

That is super cool, man.

Do you have a demo for that 240 elements assembly?

mrtnmcc15• 12 days ago

We should have a video about MoonRF once we finish the QuadRF mass production, look for it ~ early September! Will be legendary! You can read on how the multi-tile synchronization and calibration works here: https://QuadRF.com/docs/#phased-arrays

digdugdirk• 12 days ago

Super cool! I noticed you had a blurb about it being used for mesh networks? Could you please go into more details/provide links to resources to learn more about that?

mrtnmcc15• 12 days ago

Absolutely :) we're working on documenting an awesome Meshtastic demo. Should have a writeup next week to add to the Crowd Supply updates page. Also Roy on our team will be demoing it (along with the RF augmented reality) at Teardown 2026 in Portland if you're in that neck of the woods.

mallets3• 12 days ago

The really intriguing part is the "Custom ADC" here, seems like some kind of 1-bit ΣΔ oversampling ADC (704 MSPS?). Single differential transistor, and captured by FPGAs LVDS RX.

Neat way to reduce cost and pin-count? But I think the typical FPGA clock tree has poor jitter performance. Not using the internal PLL(s) might help with spurs but the clock buffers are unavoidable.

The documentation mentions it's likely further degraded by noise from switching regulators. Oh the joys of hunting RF noise sources.

mrtnmcc15• 12 days ago

We've got the switching noise nailed down. Fortunately the LVDS jitter doesn't affect the sigma delta too badly because that impacts proportional to baseband frequency which is largely filtered out by the decimation filters beyond 40 MHz.. With a total of eight ADCs per QuadRF, you can see we are getting huge savings by being custom! While the per-ADC ENOB is 7-8 bits, another nice thing about phased arrays is that the quantization/ADC noise averages away between elements, so with 8 ADCs in QuadRF we pick up another 1.5 bit giving 8.5-9.5 ENOB, which is frankly better than most SDRs. For the bigger phased arrays that improves further quickly.

Eisenstein• 11 days ago

For those confused about what this means, my understanding is this: when quantizing a wave you can use sampling rate to derive missing bits, so using even one bit can work if you do it fast enough, but jitter is a problem because it means the clock doesn't cleanly sync and it doesn't help non-quantization noise like those generated from switching supplies. Corrections welcome.

developer5502• 12 days ago

Super cool project I've been following for a while. Are you pivoting away from Earth-Moon-Earth radio astronomy? I first bookmarked this project when your site was hosted at https://open.space

mrtnmcc15• 12 days ago

Yes open-space was a short-lived name: https://domainnamewire.com/2026/04/08/u-s-defense-contractor... (good story though) We finally settled on Scale RF for the company and Quad RF for the product (and Moon RF for the bigger phased arrays!). Yes that incident kind of made our brand a mess..

radicality• 12 days ago

Product looks cool, not sure what I’ll use it for but did just purchase it on crowdsupply :) How did you settle on that frequency range btw? It’s 4.9 - 6ghz, so it will visualize the higher freq WiFi, but I guess it will not work for the 2.4ghz WiFi, or Bluetooth which is also around that frequency? And I don’t know tooo much about RF, but would including support for that range also, have necessitated much more complex/expensive hardware/antennas ?

mrtnmcc15• 12 days ago

Thanks for the support! C-band is really the sweet spot in terms of affordability and compact size (the scale of the antennas and array spacing increases proportional to the wavelength). Maybe at some point we'll develop something at 2.4, but more devices are moving into 5GHz these days.

victorhooi• 12 days ago

This does look cool - but I suspect most of the stuff I'd use it with is 2.4 Ghz (i.e. ISM band) - IOT devices, wireless keyboard/mouse, wireless cameras, drones etc

Is a 2.4Ghz version mostly about the larger physical size? Or are there other technical limitations to overcome as well?

And cost wise - would it be 2x this version ($499) - or higher?

RyJones2• 12 days ago

if I put two of these far-ish apart, can I get better 3d/4d data?

butvacuum2• 12 days ago

of course? not working directly together maybe, but put them at right angles and you get depth without relying on signal amplitude analysis.

did I misunderstand the question?

momoschili• 12 days ago

can this sense mice?

tverbeure2• 12 days ago

Are you concerned about the issue that KrakenRF ran into with their passive radar demo project violating ITAR rules, or is that something that can easily be avoided by just not doing that specific kind of application?

mrtnmcc15• 12 days ago

We don't support passive or active radar beyond basic near-field sensing. We also proactively submitted a detailed report to the State Department earlier this year showing we don't exceed any of the USML criteria for ITAR controls. Separately we have an ECCN determination under EAR. This does rule us out from exporting to a few places (Cuba, Iran, Russia, North Korea, Syria, and some regions of Ukraine). But we are able to ship to most countries.

stagger87• 12 days ago

Nice project, congrats!

Rx/TX isolation?

Typical image rejection (dB)?

Does it support hardware level timestamping to align tx and rx samples through soapy?

mrtnmcc15• 9 days ago

Tx/Rx isolation is about -35dB to -40dB depending on the Tx/Rx polarization selection. The QEC image rejection is about -50dBc in Rx, and about -40dBc in Tx (one-time cal, without background cal enabled). The Tx and Rx are perfectly synchronized. This allows you to easily do things like near-field 4x4 MIMO radar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVqESemU_AI

antman• 12 days ago

What distance of drone detection would this theoretically have?

yonatan8070• 11 days ago

I assume it depends mostly on what frequency and TX power the drone in question is using, as well as the RF environment you're operating in and the noise floor of the SDR

ZeroCool2u• 11 days ago

Really cool! Just ordered one. Do you guys have an active lab in SB?

fleventynine• 11 days ago

Is the RTL for the FPGA available to be tinkered with?

Svoka• 12 days ago

It is crazy for me to see super secret military tech from 30 years ago commoditized to a system cheaper than gaming console. What a time to be alive!

fc417fc8025• 12 days ago

I don't think it was ever (past 30 years) particularly secret? The general concept is long (100+ years) established. However pulling it off used to be exorbitantly expensive.

noduerme• 12 days ago

Funny, in the "imagine what governments are capable of" vein, I just read this[0] a few minutes ago before coming over to HN to find this post trending.

[0] https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/the-future-takes-fl...

quietsignal• 12 days ago

Yep, been in the works for a while. Ericsson, Nokia Bell Labs and Qualcomm have been publishing press releases regarding ISAC and telecom providers also sees new potential market of S2aaS, especially if there is a push towards autonomous robots, vehicles that need the data for mapping & training data.

Future networks using millimeter-wave (mmWave) and sub-terahertz (THz) frequencies may collect or infer detailed information about people, devices, bystanders, passive objects, and environments in a sixth-generation (6G) deployment area. It may detect breathing and heart rate of biological bodies.

https://eprint.iacr.org/2026/1069

greggsy4• 11 days ago

Seems like a contender for the tricorder prize that was announced ten or so years ago might not be too far off.

jeremyjh• 12 days ago

I have a feeling they are not planning to sell it to government agencies for $500. Our tax dollars will go a lot less far I expect.

cucumber37328422• 11 days ago

Remember how for years starting in the late teens and fizzling out over covid university paper after university paper about "this is so cool look how we can see through walls by essentially using 5g and wifi as ambient light" and they steadily marched up the chain from simple room layouts to furniture layouts, occupant detection, occupant movement and then started being dressed up with the usual dogwhistle language about "emergency services" that people who are building tech to help infantry/police entry teams use to make it seem more noble and then after that it all just kinda stopped being publicized with any sort of regularity?

I'm not a conspiracy theorist but I'd say all the people working on that shit got hired.

Sorry not sorry for the run on sentence.

greggsy4• 11 days ago

I stopped reading halfway through in frustration and then saw your apology.

You only need to apologise to yourself really.

llm_nerd• 12 days ago

What constraint limits this to 5 - 6Ghz? Is it the antenna? Processing?

It's a really neat device, but people should realize that it has a very narrow visibility.

KaiserPro4• 12 days ago

Antennae, and the front end that feeds into the SDR.

The lower the frequency, the bigger the antennae need to be (more or less) so a 2.4gig array would most likely be 2x the size of a 6ghz array.

0xdeadbeefbabe• 12 days ago

If the open source community can come up with something like this, just imagine what governments are capable of.

Why so bullish on government? The department of motor vehicles is capable of being better, but they aren't.

brikym• 12 days ago

Now imagine thousands of these flying around in low earth orbit.

deadcatfound• 12 days ago

Super cool concept!

stevage• 12 days ago

It can see WiFi through walls

I don't understand what this is trying to say. Everyone who has ever used wi-fi knows that it works through walls. You try to connect to a wi-fi in an apartment, and there are dozens of other networks showing up.

So this headline just seems...meaningless?

Barbing• 12 days ago

We know the definitions of "see" and when we take it to be in the "visualize" sense, it tracks for me.

roncesvalles• 12 days ago

I'm guessing if you can "see" Wifi through a wall, you can also infer some things about what's behind the wall, because the signal will have certain obstruction patterns. It becomes an xray.

stevenhuang• 12 days ago

It's RF vision, it let's you visualize RF sources as a coloured blob overlay in real time.

wiredone• 12 days ago

Outside of spotting ukrainian drone operators in bunkers, why would you need or want this?

timonoko2• 11 days ago

I want this. I have Wifi door lock too far away from base station. It was often stuck in a loop trying to connect to neighbours' Wifis. By try and error I managed to block those using metal foil, but it was hard work.

NetMageSCW4• 11 days ago

That would seem to be a design flaw in the lock. It shouldn’t be trying to connect to random WiFi.

ww520• 12 days ago

One use of focused RF detectors is locating hidden cameras via scanning their WiFi or Bluetooth RF signals.

swalberg• 11 days ago

Would something like this work at much lower frequencies? Being able to see RF at 3-30MHz would be fantastic for hunting RFI in the amateur radio HF bands.

QuadRF can spot drones and see WiFi through my wall

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