Comment by jenowigner
16 days ago
amazing project ! well done ! inspiring to see it this morning the youtube algo recommended it for me. I was thinking what would be a budget way of creating this ? maybe a $20 SDR instead of the hack rf , seems to be a waste of the hack rf to use it as a lamp :)) I think the way you did must have cost you over $1k. Thanks for the inspiration !
Hackrf is defo overkill for this. I got it cause my initial plan was to cover the whole spectrum
You could probably do it with a cheaper SDR, but it would be slower
Total budget for this is around $1k
IIRC, a regular SDR dongle will not be able to process the full bandwidth of GHZ range.
I do think most people implementing something like this, especially in the exact way this one was implemented would really just be interested in the Wi-Fi ranges.
When I was doing wireless stuff we'd show customers the output of RF analysers to show that even with their wifi turned off their spectrum was packed full of noise.
Having a large viceral display of this would quickly enlighten them.
The $5 nrf52840 should be sufficient, it can scan 114 channels (from 2400-2514 MHz) several times per second, measuring the approximate RSSI.
You could not use that as an SDR to make a waterfall which is required in this case
You do not need a full SDR to make a waterfall. The nrf52840 can function as a coarse spectrum analyzer, because it lets you tune to any frequency within its range, and then measure the approximate received signal strength over a period of time[0]. I have tested this myself, and it works pretty well. The only downside compared to an SDR is that it can only listen to one frequency at a time, so it will sometimes miss short signals.
[0] https://docs.nordicsemi.com/bundle/ps_nrf52840/page/radio.ht...
1 reply →
HackRF isn't a good SDR by any metric except for the date it came out.
What would a better alternative be?