Comment by HNisCIS
17 hours ago
I'm struggling to understand the signal chain or antenna architecture here. If those two MAX chips are 2829s this would be 2x2 mimo per tile but I'm not super familiar with that product line and the PCB layout looks like a 4x4 setup.
And yeah, the agentic stuff is dumb, I've played a ton with doing low level SDR work on Opus 4.6 and it's truly ass.
Also, the "can't radar, plz don't ITAR" is horseshit. Some basic fw tweaks and you could get this to be, at the very least, a sweet FMCW setup.
MAX2850/2851 4x4. Also, large radar stuff is more nuanced than "just some fw tweaks" as you claim. Same as Facebook is not just some PHP scripts...
I used to work radar systems. The point being that the hardware is fully capable. The software side is quite well understood at this point. There will be plenty of repos floating around in a year to turn this into an airborne drone SAR or whatever. Functional range resolution will be around 4m but that's plenty for most shenanigans.
At a functional range resolution of 4M would it even qualify as violating ITAR even if it was tweaked to do so?
> Also, the "can't radar, plz don't ITAR" is horseshit.
My assumption is that they're trying to avoid crossing a legal line, as opposed to being personally invested in the idea of preventing radar use by a determined hobbyist.
ITAR feels a lot like Bernstein v. US all over again. Until very recently, everyone who can do anything that would be covered by ITAR was a giant corporation that likes the moat that regulations create, so it's unthinkable to challenge it. But that is changing, just like cryptography was in the early 90s.