RF Spectrum Mapping | Hacker News Reader

RF Spectrum Mapping

he360.com

74 pointsseamac318 comments

This is some real Enemy of the State scifi capability here. Anywhere they have birds overhead, you are a realtime moving dot on the map even if you have no cell coverage, with history.

And because it's a private company, they don't need a warrant to do this AND they can sell it to whoever does need a warrant.

It doesn't quite work like that.

That entirely depends on the sensitivity of their detection; but I'd guess that it does work like that.

Explain. Why not?

The site advertises the ability to track individual handheld VHF/UHF radios, which are within an order of magnitude of the transmit power of cellular handsets. Even if they don't have the power to do that right now, they certainly could in the next generation of satellites.

Or they might already have the power right now and just not be advertising it. Or maybe the hardware is there but the software is still being refined. (This strikes me as the most likely, since the digital transmission from a cellphone is significantly different from analog voice, it would take some different processing layers to handle it.)

With the current constellation, they advertise 24 passes per day, but as they continue to add satellites, it approaches continuous. Furthermore, if the capability is commercially valuable, it's possible that other megaconstellations could just add the functionality to their own next-gen birds and then it's completely game-over.

The limiting factor, as I understand it, would be downlink bandwidth. And there are a number of mitigations (on-orbit processing and compression, etc) for that.

Do you mean a phone wouldn't broadcast an IMSI, without a base station nearby?

It sounds like passive IMSI catching is possible though - https://harrisonsand.com/posts/imsi-catcher/ at least when a phone connects to a base station.

Conveniently HQ'd in Herndon, VA too - wonder why?

Or buy a hackrf one and make a wideband antenna like a a bicone or dual planar disk or tapered slot, etc, and use Qspectrumanalyzer with the hackrf_sweep backend to frequency hop at 8 GHz/s (@20 MS/s) for spectrum monitoring.

edit: Now that someone provided an archive.org mirror I see the site is actually about truly global radio monitoring as a service. That's pretty cool. There's plenty of public/open SDRs online and some that do hyperbolic multi-lateration of signals but nothing so integrated or comprehensive. The USA's Unified Data Library has a lot of this kind of thing too. Unfortunately for regular US citizen accounts you can't use the RF monitoring endpoints in the API or web interface.

I do wonder how much of it is pulled from open sources, how much is bought and how much is from their own deployed hardware.

Current hotness is building broker companies because all anyone wants to fund is direct sale stuff. It's a tossup whether they have their own satellites or are buying data from someone else. If they're running the satellite constellation themselves then this is more speculative than reality at this moment most likely. The capabilities they seem to be claiming are, funny enough, beyond what the available downlink spectrum can support given current constraints.

Tangent: how would you incentivize people to provide this data with accruacry regarding payment. How do you prove how good the data is, compare it to others I guess or voting.

No need. Offer them a free browser + free email + free maps + free mobile OS and you have all the tracking you could wish for.

I wasn't thinking about tracking. I was thinking it would be cool if people can setup data collection sites like an anemometer in the case of weather or an SDR/something like that for RF in this case... what would incentivize them to make it good/get paid more... how do you verify it, not just made up data.

They have their own satellites, none of it is open source. You can find all 20+ of them in the SATCAT at http://celestrak.org/satcat/table-satcat.php?NAME=hawk&PAYLO.... Ignore the SEAHAWK and HAWKSAT-1 entries, those are from other organizations.

“RF Mapping” or open sourced SIGINT? So many issues here. The IC at least has to abide by the constitution (fourth admenment, hello?). What does HE360 have to abide by? Entire company is full of ex-IC contractors and government employees. So.. they’ve essentially taken government tech and now trying to resell it to them? Surprised there isn’t more outrage. These guys will get hacked and a country with no SIGINT program will suddenly have access to an entire constellation. Nice.

https://web.archive.org/web/20230630031721/https://www.he360...

https://www.gammarf.io is (was?) a ground based version of this for local areas. Bought out by https://www.sensorscape.io but afaik nothing has been done with it

https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/interception-and-divulg...

Does this law apply in the USA or is it moot because it's not about content?

I wish I had a better macro mindset (to make money) for example you have access to satellite imagery, can do (what) analysis, what makes it valuable for people to buy the insight.

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