This same devloper also built an SDR out of an ESP32 Wi-Fi microcontroller [1], this is awesome!
This development makes me hope that we'd be seeing more of these on common Wi-Fi cards, so that every random laptop could be used as an SDR for many fun and useful applications on a budget.
Having done repairs on a ton of older service monitors, and having my hand in SDR, this is amazing! There's a huge amount of machining and hardware to make a service monitor, but with desktop CNC, cheap PCBS, and jelly bean components that go into the 10s of GHz, the sky's the limit.
I'd add a heat sunk 100 watt DC-5Ghz 20dB fixed attenuator, 0-110 dB switched attenuator, 5 ghz low pass filter, 7-12 Ghz local oscillator/mixer up/down converter, and it would make a small, very high performance service monitor good to 5 Ghz. 8)
I've edited it, but generally you don't want to have problems with mirror images getting through and creating spurious responses. Real world RF filters don't have infinitely steep edges, so initially I figured a 4 Ghz low pass filter would have enough loss by 5 Ghz to get the job done. I revised to to a 5 Ghz low filter, and a 7-12 Ghz Local Oscillator to give the filter an easier job. Also, the lower the swing in percentage terms for a VCO, the easier it is to work with.
So the signal path in receive mode would be:
N connector / 20 dB 100 watt pad / Switched attenuator / Low pass filter / Front End diodes / Mixer / Router board for DSP
Alternatively, there's usually a second path that skips the attenuator, with a lower maximum power level.
The reverse path would work for generating signals from DC (almost) to 5 Ghz.
I can't keep up with the rapid, non stop cool stuff being discovered! Someone figured out how to get the ESP32 to transmit, at lower bandwidth (I think I read 200-250khz) I don't know which project it was but there are a bunch on this site:
Holy cow... I've got to limit my projects, so I don't repeat history where I kept finding radio shack bags full of parts for ideas. But you can get 3 of those, with external antennas for less than $60 through amazon. I put it in my wish list instead of buying them now. I've got a data diode to finish first.
Sideband on 13 CM sounds like an amazing thing to pull off.
"BRINGUP, from a cold radio: what MediaTek's ROM patch does at download (XO, pin mux, the CONN AFE calibration pulse per band, the A-die TOP init by chip ID, pads and CONN switch, the A-dies' eFuse trims); the UMAC pool layout; the common and per-band PHY initialisation; on each A-die the RF init tables, the resistor calibration and the RC filter calibration; the FEM outputs and the crystal trim."
That's not even some other language poorly translated to English, that's just a bunch of words.
Between stuff like this and math "proofs" that aren't readable either I'm really challenged to see the benefit here.
What I get out of this is that one could, if you had the documentation, write a more generalized SDR application for this hardware than the Wifi7 application. That an LLM model can provoke this behavior seems as a good existence proof perhaps?
> That's not even some other language poorly translated to English, that's just a bunch of words.
The language makes sense if you've worked with radio chips or firmware.
Terms like XO (crystal oscillator) and pin mux (chip pin multiplexer, basically assigning pins to their role) are common for embedded work, not just radio work.
Usually in a project you get that language hidden in a separate implementation doc where casual readers won't get confused by it.
Yes there are radio terms in there. :-) That said, I've written combined firmware/gateware drivers for dedicated radio chips and that paragraph makes little sense to me. Even the RFSoC docs from AMD/Xilinx are better written and they are pretty damn dense.
> Even the RFSoC docs from AMD/Xilinx are better written
This project isn't meant to be vendor-quality documentation of the chipset. It's a reverse engineering project that succeeded and included enough documentation to build upon.
Comparing a freely shared reverse engineering proof of concept to vendor-provided 1st party documentation is a ridiculous high bar.
This is a cool project that was just shared hours ago. Criticizing it for not being 1st party vendor documentation quality is a really bad faith criticism.
Okay. So let's pretend it is simple a proof-of-concept (PoC) rather than a full blown project, it's opening paragraph in README.md is:
"Turns a Gemtek W1700K Wi-Fi 7 router into a wideband software-defined receiver. The router's MediaTek MT7996 radio captures raw 14-bit IQ at up to 320 Msps, its Airoha AN7581 SoC streams it over 10 GbE, and a Linux host shows it as a live spectrum and waterfall in the browser, with the receiver's controls next to it."
Does that read paragraph say "Hey check out this PoC!" to you?
So a human, used Claude code to reverse engineer a device. Fine, let THAT be the readme. If it had said, "This is something that was accomplished with Claude code reverse engineering this thing, I have no idea how it works, but that it does work is evidenced by the spectrum I can show."
For those of us who are "skilled in the art" as they say, this reads like "Hey check this out, I bypassed the paywall by putting in my Mom's credit card number!" The lede here is that Claude can reverse engineer things. That was most informatively shown with an article that showed up here titled "All the things I own, owned."
The comment I replied to simply said, "Thanks Claude." Which is droll, but accurate. And, for me, the criticism of showing off something you "did" with a tool you don't understand and whose outputs you don't understand, reminds me strongly of the script kiddies of the 90's and naughts who would boldly proclaim "Hey, check it out, I got root on <website>." when all they had done was run Metasploit and walked through a bunch of scripts until they hit an RCE vulnerability and then used it to gain root (with another script).
So at some point the vendor will go through and patch the holes which the model had exploited and they will have to rewrite their admin architecture, and maybe be liable to some fines with the chip companies if "Intellectual Property" was improperly disclosed by their failure to write good software. And are we any closer to using the products as a general purpose SDR? No, we are not.
Contrast that with the folks who reverse engineered the RealTek DVB-T tuner chip, and had an understanding of what they had done and how it worked, and it spawned a bunch of RTL-SDR dongles that introduced lots of people to SDRs.
It is a really cool project, and it is an interesting proof of concept which could be the starting point for reverse engineering these boxes. But the author chose to present it as a complete ready to go project with documentation of things like their "architecture."
I suspect it is also true that neither the author, and certainly not the large language model, has any idea about how this firmware even works.
> write a more generalized SDR application for this hardware
Yeahhh, no. Sorry but the entry barrier is now extremely lowered, especially in effort.
~20 years ago this would have been literally sci-fi. Back then just getting an USRP to work with gnu-radio, then finding the proper hardware external clock, then doing lots of work on reading / trying stuff / writing scripts etc. took a ton of effort and time. Having the ability to throw tokens at it and have at least a starting point is amazing, IMO.
If someone wants to set up some hardware in a harness and then spend their tokens reverse engineering it, I'm thankful for the publication.
A year ago it was different. I looked at a lot of these vibe-RE projects and a lot of them wouldn't even do what they claimed. Now if someone points a frontier model at some code and lets it consume tokens for a few days, the output is often valuable as a starting point for other projects.
320MSPS at this frequencies for less than $100 that can be extracted over 10GBit/s.
This was worth upper 4- to 5-digit of dollars of equipment before.
I work in this industry and sold more than one kidney for this stuff.
Same for the ESP-SDR project. Most likely it can be used for transmitting on S-Band for satellite control in the future (with an amplifier, dish, maybe some filtering). The HF-Frontend is Wi-Fi certified and therefore quite clean. I've forwarded this project to a friend who's close to ESA staff.
You're referencing a 5-figure rig like the ADRV9040 I suppose? I don't work in that industry but I do dabble in SDR hobbies and I guess due to my advancing age I view this as linear progress rather than breakthroughs. Two decades ago it was $1 million worth of junk.
Yes. That's a very modern design. Lots of MIMO.. so I assume you will find that beast in cellular base stations.
I'd more see it as a huge jump in the higher frequencies.
>2GHz basically became cheap now over night.
Thanks to Claude&co. it now only takes maybe a few hours to find (or brute force ) potential registers to spit out raw I/Q streams. The last huge breakthrough there was the now rather old Rtlsdr project around the Osmocom dudes.
Not the point but the Airhona could here is really neat. AN7581 with typical quad Cortex-A53 but then 8x RISC-V network coprocessors. Good luck figuring out how to use that though, whew! (Go Astra go.)
https://www.airoha.com/products/p/NpfqGLnZiZuYUZ6N
I've been thinking how beautiful and awesome it is that SDR finally has a real jump. The QuadRF using the rpi's mipi connector was such a glorious hack! Custom ADC from parts. 80MSps. https://www.crowdsupply.com/scale-rf/quadrf
And man what a huge flying leap forward here. 320MSps! Much deeper 14b IQ precision vs 8b. The totally custom mediatek radio firmware is incredible. Such incredible possibility. Maybe someday the mimo can be useful for some of the same neat AoE / beam forming capabilities?
It is cool to do. But there are professional uses for it, particularly like finding interference or noise. You can ask things like: "How crowded is my 2.4 GHz spectrum?"
The RTL SDR is the gateway drug into SDR's. The bandwidth is limited, so don't expect to be capturing HDTV Streams. But it's certainly possible to listen to AM/FM, Ham Bands, VHF/UHF signals, etc.
If you don't want to buy an RTL-SDR, you can search KiwiSDR which is a streaming SDR for frequencies under 30MHz. You can also connect to KiwiSDR's worldwide.
Then if you get the itch, you can go get your a HackRF, a ham license, or whatever else scratches it.
I've used it to identify transmissions in my neighborhood in the public (ISM) band, listen to various radio broadcasts outside the normal AM/FM, and best of all, track all the planes in my area (ADS-B).
wow, could this be turned into a 2.4ghz SAR? I always wondered if it’d be possible to use something like that to pick up wifi signals from much farther away. Of course a more sensible choice would just be to use a yagi antenna
Can you order them from amazon.com? I've ordered stuff from amazon.co.jp and amazon.de before and although it doesn't get there in two days, it does show up eventually.
This development makes me hope that we'd be seeing more of these on common Wi-Fi cards, so that every random laptop could be used as an SDR for many fun and useful applications on a budget.
https://github.com/h0m3us3r/eSpDR
I'd add a heat sunk 100 watt DC-5Ghz 20dB fixed attenuator, 0-110 dB switched attenuator, 5 ghz low pass filter, 7-12 Ghz local oscillator/mixer up/down converter, and it would make a small, very high performance service monitor good to 5 Ghz. 8)
So the signal path in receive mode would be:
N connector / 20 dB 100 watt pad / Switched attenuator / Low pass filter / Front End diodes / Mixer / Router board for DSP
Alternatively, there's usually a second path that skips the attenuator, with a lower maximum power level.
The reverse path would work for generating signals from DC (almost) to 5 Ghz.
That's quite a good deal...
https://www.rtl-sdr.com/esp32-sdr-turbo-mode-throughput-impr...
Sideband on 13 CM sounds like an amazing thing to pull off.
"BRINGUP, from a cold radio: what MediaTek's ROM patch does at download (XO, pin mux, the CONN AFE calibration pulse per band, the A-die TOP init by chip ID, pads and CONN switch, the A-dies' eFuse trims); the UMAC pool layout; the common and per-band PHY initialisation; on each A-die the RF init tables, the resistor calibration and the RC filter calibration; the FEM outputs and the crystal trim."
That's not even some other language poorly translated to English, that's just a bunch of words.
Between stuff like this and math "proofs" that aren't readable either I'm really challenged to see the benefit here.
What I get out of this is that one could, if you had the documentation, write a more generalized SDR application for this hardware than the Wifi7 application. That an LLM model can provoke this behavior seems as a good existence proof perhaps?
The language makes sense if you've worked with radio chips or firmware.
Terms like XO (crystal oscillator) and pin mux (chip pin multiplexer, basically assigning pins to their role) are common for embedded work, not just radio work.
Usually in a project you get that language hidden in a separate implementation doc where casual readers won't get confused by it.
This project isn't meant to be vendor-quality documentation of the chipset. It's a reverse engineering project that succeeded and included enough documentation to build upon.
Comparing a freely shared reverse engineering proof of concept to vendor-provided 1st party documentation is a ridiculous high bar.
This is a cool project that was just shared hours ago. Criticizing it for not being 1st party vendor documentation quality is a really bad faith criticism.
"Turns a Gemtek W1700K Wi-Fi 7 router into a wideband software-defined receiver. The router's MediaTek MT7996 radio captures raw 14-bit IQ at up to 320 Msps, its Airoha AN7581 SoC streams it over 10 GbE, and a Linux host shows it as a live spectrum and waterfall in the browser, with the receiver's controls next to it."
Does that read paragraph say "Hey check out this PoC!" to you?
So a human, used Claude code to reverse engineer a device. Fine, let THAT be the readme. If it had said, "This is something that was accomplished with Claude code reverse engineering this thing, I have no idea how it works, but that it does work is evidenced by the spectrum I can show."
For those of us who are "skilled in the art" as they say, this reads like "Hey check this out, I bypassed the paywall by putting in my Mom's credit card number!" The lede here is that Claude can reverse engineer things. That was most informatively shown with an article that showed up here titled "All the things I own, owned."
The comment I replied to simply said, "Thanks Claude." Which is droll, but accurate. And, for me, the criticism of showing off something you "did" with a tool you don't understand and whose outputs you don't understand, reminds me strongly of the script kiddies of the 90's and naughts who would boldly proclaim "Hey, check it out, I got root on <website>." when all they had done was run Metasploit and walked through a bunch of scripts until they hit an RCE vulnerability and then used it to gain root (with another script).
So at some point the vendor will go through and patch the holes which the model had exploited and they will have to rewrite their admin architecture, and maybe be liable to some fines with the chip companies if "Intellectual Property" was improperly disclosed by their failure to write good software. And are we any closer to using the products as a general purpose SDR? No, we are not.
Contrast that with the folks who reverse engineered the RealTek DVB-T tuner chip, and had an understanding of what they had done and how it worked, and it spawned a bunch of RTL-SDR dongles that introduced lots of people to SDRs.
It is a really cool project, and it is an interesting proof of concept which could be the starting point for reverse engineering these boxes. But the author chose to present it as a complete ready to go project with documentation of things like their "architecture."
I suspect it is also true that neither the author, and certainly not the large language model, has any idea about how this firmware even works.
> write a more generalized SDR application for this hardware
Yeahhh, no. Sorry but the entry barrier is now extremely lowered, especially in effort.
~20 years ago this would have been literally sci-fi. Back then just getting an USRP to work with gnu-radio, then finding the proper hardware external clock, then doing lots of work on reading / trying stuff / writing scripts etc. took a ton of effort and time. Having the ability to throw tokens at it and have at least a starting point is amazing, IMO.
A year ago it was different. I looked at a lot of these vibe-RE projects and a lot of them wouldn't even do what they claimed. Now if someone points a frontier model at some code and lets it consume tokens for a few days, the output is often valuable as a starting point for other projects.
We now can programm more manual tuned stuff to turn this into a full 13cm and 5cm radio as it was proven to work.
Before the esp-sdr hack and this one both bands were quite difficult and pricey to reach.
This was worth upper 4- to 5-digit of dollars of equipment before.
I work in this industry and sold more than one kidney for this stuff.
Same for the ESP-SDR project. Most likely it can be used for transmitting on S-Band for satellite control in the future (with an amplifier, dish, maybe some filtering). The HF-Frontend is Wi-Fi certified and therefore quite clean. I've forwarded this project to a friend who's close to ESA staff.
Yes. That's a very modern design. Lots of MIMO.. so I assume you will find that beast in cellular base stations.
I'd more see it as a huge jump in the higher frequencies.
>2GHz basically became cheap now over night.
Thanks to Claude&co. it now only takes maybe a few hours to find (or brute force ) potential registers to spit out raw I/Q streams. The last huge breakthrough there was the now rather old Rtlsdr project around the Osmocom dudes.
OpenAI seething that they didn’t pick a fucking name for their platform.
Not the point but the Airhona could here is really neat. AN7581 with typical quad Cortex-A53 but then 8x RISC-V network coprocessors. Good luck figuring out how to use that though, whew! (Go Astra go.) https://www.airoha.com/products/p/NpfqGLnZiZuYUZ6N
I've been thinking how beautiful and awesome it is that SDR finally has a real jump. The QuadRF using the rpi's mipi connector was such a glorious hack! Custom ADC from parts. 80MSps. https://www.crowdsupply.com/scale-rf/quadrf
And man what a huge flying leap forward here. 320MSps! Much deeper 14b IQ precision vs 8b. The totally custom mediatek radio firmware is incredible. Such incredible possibility. Maybe someday the mimo can be useful for some of the same neat AoE / beam forming capabilities?
The RTL SDR is the gateway drug into SDR's. The bandwidth is limited, so don't expect to be capturing HDTV Streams. But it's certainly possible to listen to AM/FM, Ham Bands, VHF/UHF signals, etc.
If you don't want to buy an RTL-SDR, you can search KiwiSDR which is a streaming SDR for frequencies under 30MHz. You can also connect to KiwiSDR's worldwide.
Then if you get the itch, you can go get your a HackRF, a ham license, or whatever else scratches it.
Ham radio operators looking forward using them for 13cm and 5cm band stuff.
You cannot sell them with the tag if it wasn't connected to standardized certification test system at least once.
I’m not seeing a synopsis of the significance of this, for the uninitiated
What is Msps? I’m not familiar with that scale
Every WiFi modem has a testmode. It's required to verify the TX/RX chain during manufacturing and for compliance testing.
Seemingly you can read out the entire spectrum at full rate.
The significance is that most off the shelf SDR platforms have much lower specs. Almost all of them use the same Analog Devices transceiver chip.