Comment by jenowigner
4 hours 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 isn't a good SDR by any metric except for the date it came out.
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
The $5 nrf52840 should be sufficient, it can scan 114 channels (from 2400-2514 MHz) several times per second, measuring the approximate RSSI.
IIRC, a regular SDR dongle will not be able to process the full bandwidth of GHZ range.