[Hackrf-dev] project insights from the HackRF Team

[Kevin Reid]

On Tue, Apr 25, 2017 at 3:58 PM, Gary Newell <garyn87048 at gmail.com> wrote:

> I’m curious if you happen to know of an open source SDR effort that is
> focused on passively painting a picture of all the electronic devices
> transmitting nearby?  A snapshot of my current environment?  For example,
> I’m currently near these cellphone towers, there are these sets of TPMS
> near me, these devices are seeking wifi connections, these wifi sources are
> available, these Bluetooth devices are active, and this ‘thing’
> transmitting unknown stuff.  Totally novice question, … I see projects for
> particular areas, but are you aware of one that pulls the various efforts
> into one integrated ‘proximity’ package?
>

It's a long way from actually doing this, but what you describe is part of
the long-term vision for my ShinySDR project:
https://github.com/kpreid/shinysdr

Right now, the only relevant things that it does are

   - Manage multiple demodulators (either as GNU Radio blocks or as
   subprocesses) and multiple hardware receivers in one application (so the
   hardware can be shared, or not, among the different demodulators, as
   needed).
   - Displaying telemetry messages from multiple sources/protocols (e.g. I
   can display both ADS-B and APRS location data on the same map).

The things that I see adding which would make it closer to what you are
looking for are:

   - Built-in knowledge of “where to look” — setting up the proper
   demodulators on the proper frequencies rather than expecting the user to do
   so (I have "frequency databases" but those are currently set up more for
   "here are all the known channels/stations, pick one" than "ADS-B is always
   on 1090 MHz so you should be able to just go there implicitly when you pick
   ADS-B").
   - Long-term persistence of gathered information (right now it is
   oriented around short timeouts for real-time tracking and has no logging).
   - Background scanning — when no user is asking to look at a particular
   center frequency, change frequencies to gather either specific signals or
   just spectrum power density over time (as in rtl_power).
   - Decoding more protocols, of course (GSM, WiFi, Bluetooth, and TPMS
   aren't among the ones I've gotten to yet — I've been focused on
   low-bandwidth stuff).
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