Yet another Hacker News

Turn a WiFi 7 Router into a 320Msps Software Defined Radio Receiver

84 points djfergus 5 hours ago 22 comments

aftbit 1 hour ago | parent

Wow that's super cool! It's not DC to daylight but I sure don't know a cheaper way to get a 320 Msps receiver at 5 GHz.

asdff 57 minutes ago | parent

Thanks claude

ChuckMcM 51 minutes ago | parent

Yeah, reading stuff like:

"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?

Aurornis 38 minutes ago | parent

> 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.

ChuckMcM 17 minutes ago | parent

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.

NitpickLawyer 22 minutes ago | parent

> I'm really challenged to see the benefit here.

> 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.

BlackRabbit1 48 minutes ago | parent

Claude or not: It's a huge breakthrough for ham radio and signal analysis.

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.

jeffbee 46 minutes ago | parent

Why is this a breakthrough? Just because the platform costs under $100?

BlackRabbit1 45 minutes ago | parent

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.

jeffbee 39 minutes ago | parent

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.

BlackRabbit1 33 minutes ago | parent

> ADRV9040

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.

SV_BubbleTime 25 minutes ago | parent

> Claude&co

OpenAI seething that they didn’t pick a fucking name for their platform.

Aurornis 31 minutes ago | parent

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.

jeffbee 50 minutes ago | parent

An accurate description is "turn an SDR into an SDR".

mikewarot 45 minutes ago | parent

With the right upconverter, that's amazing. It wouldn't take much, really, a phase locked vco from 5 to 10 ghz, mixer, and a 4ghz low pass filter to turn it into the basis of a 4 Ghz communications service monitor.

acd 35 minutes ago | parent

What is the radio quality like SNR?

BlackRabbit1 29 minutes ago | parent

I'd assume top notch if it's Wi-Fi certified. And basically all Mediatek modems are.

You cannot sell them with the tag if it wasn't connected to standardized certification system at least once.

thebeardisred 31 minutes ago | parent

FYI, since it's the same chipset I'm pretty certain this will work on the Banana Pi R4, which has built in PCIe for NVMe.

yonatan8070 28 minutes ago | parent

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.

https://github.com/h0m3us3r/eSpDR

jedbrooke 24 minutes ago | parent

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

octoberfranklin 10 minutes ago | parent

It's RX-only.

BlackRabbit1 1 minute ago | parent

Yet.