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Comment by superkuh | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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