For people interested in other SDR options, I believe these guys were YC funded: Per Vices, <a href="http://www.pervices.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.pervices.com/</a><p>Their hardware is significantly meatier, supporting frequencies from 100kHz to 4GHz with a bandwith of 250MHz. The HackRF only has a bandwith of 20MHz, and bottoms out at 30MHz.<p>I haven't heard much from them, or discussion about them, but they are out there.
Any thoughts on how this could be used as a low cost surveying tool to find sources of WiFi interference?<p>We've been considering getting one of these: <a href="http://www.metageek.net/products/wi-spy/" rel="nofollow">http://www.metageek.net/products/wi-spy/</a><p>It would be great to instead have a bit of kit that could be repurposed like HackRF.
So, it's literally a piece of hardware allowing me to take any radio signal from 30MHz to 6GHz, transfer them into digital data and read them out with my Computer? (Or other device)
<i>Man</i> it'd be nice if this (or BladeRF) went down to DC like the USRP, so you could also use it as an oscilloscope. It's easier on the USRP because of its motherboard/daughterboard architecture, which adds some cost and complexity, but the cost adder should be pretty small relative to the several-hundred-dollars these things cost.
The spec from HackRF github wiki:<p><a href="https://github.com/mossmann/hackrf/wiki/Jawbreaker" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/mossmann/hackrf/wiki/Jawbreaker</a><p>* half-duplex transceiver<p>* operating freq: 30 MHz to 6 GHz<p>* supported sample rates: 8 Msps to 20 Msps (quadrature)<p>* resolution: 8 bits<p>* interface: High Speed USB 2.0 (with USB Micro-B connector)<p>* power supply: USB bus power
This is like Nvidia/Icera's i500 modem, right?<p><a href="http://www.nvidia.com/docs/IO/116757/NVIDIA_i500_whitepaper_FINALv3.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.nvidia.com/docs/IO/116757/NVIDIA_i500_whitepaper_...</a>
This is great. I met briefly with a company developing software radio products that led me to believe such devices are illegal or require special licensing. Is my impression wrong or has this changed recently?<p>Second, can this do GSM, receive at least? Frequency band works, but maybe it doesn't have the bandwidth?
One interesting observation, I have no idea if this can be turned into a startup idea, is you can usually tell within the first two lines of comments in a "SDR" type story who is coming from an analog EE RF background and who's coming from a programmer digital background. And there's very few in between, as a percentage.<p>I donno if the startup idea is an online course for CS to understand EE or EE to understand CS or both or ... ?