GoKawiilQuadRF can spot drones and see WiFi through my wall
The QuadRF (pictured above) a phased-array radio built around a Raspberry Pi 5 and an FPGA board with picosecond-level timing. It does advanced signal processing and beamforming.
It can see WiFi through walls and track drones in flight.
If the open source community can come up with something like this, just imagine what governments are capable of.
When you plug a computer into a network, tools like Wireshark can show all the hidden traffic you might not even know is there. WiFi packets are the same, but those travel through the air, allowing snooping without physical access.
The QuadRF has built-in software that can stream and decode RF, and you can pipe it out to a more powerful computer for things like WiFi traffic analysis.
I mention this not to scare you—governments have had tools like these for years. It's just better to know what's possible and expose bad security practices than to ban useful tools like these. So if you're in the CIA, don't get any ideas.
To the Moon
After spotting QuadRF on Hackaday, I reached out to Martin McCormick, who's been working on QuadRF as part of a bigger project: a Moon-scale antenna array, capable of EME (Earth-Moon-Earth) radio experiments and radio astronomy.
I think Martin took inspiration from Dishy, SpaceX's original Starlink terminal. (Makes sense, since Martin worked at SpaceX on the team that built Dishy!)
... continue reading