A HackRF clone is cheaper than a Flipper, and way more capable in my opinion. I would bet most flippers either lie in drawers or are used by stupid teenager kiddies for trolling.
Each has their use. The Flipper is nice for quick and lightweight checking of things. LimeSDR is incredibly capable, but also a bit of a pain in the ass to use. Not something you'll flip out to quickly check something or run an experiment.
like what?
~20 seconds and one cloning later, the installer said something like "Wow, guess we need to update the employee handbook" and I no longer felt comfortable with the installation so asked them to leave after that.
I also once forgot the garage opener to the public garage I usually use, but had the signal saved on my Flipper, so that saved me like 5 minutes of not having to park, go home, go to the car and then park inside the garage.
Otherwise, it's mostly just for fun.
Reading and cloning of those fobs was easy, but the receiver wasn't accepting reusable fobs. I had to buy a special write-once fob from Lab401.
Does anyone have a good use for obsolete cables?
Like, I've got some serial cables, some co-ax, a bunch of old TV cables, some audio cables.
I tell myself I'm keeping them because if I ever need them I'll never be able to (or want to) buy them again. Moreover it feels like such a waste to throw them away.
Maybe a makerspace could make use of them?
Doing so with serial or coax cables seems like an invitation for bits of the plastic sheath breaking off in a few months and polluting the ground around your door though...
I find my FZ most useful, not for the radio stuff, but as a wireless (read: untethered) way to dump and write EEPROMs using a POMONA clip, otherwise, yes, it sits in a drawer.
Yes, but a "HackRF clone, plus a Proxmark3, plus IR, plus whatever" probably isn't.
For $400 you can get a limeSDR mini that can read and write 30MHz of spectrum at a time, ie the entire ham 70cm band all at once.
If you think a flipper is dangerous, plug in a dummy load and dump noise on L1 then watch your phones GPS stop working, or alternatively decide it's on another continent.
The community also helps. The flipper is wildly overpriced for being a glorified happy meal toy but millions of people squeezing every ounce of functional potential out of a happy meal toy is better than a few dozen people writing academic papers with mostly high end industrial (cellular base station) and military applications.
If you want to move data between two points, 30MHz of "bandwidth", depending on noise and signal, can be on the order of 30MB/s data rates or more assuming you're good at doing QAM or similar modulation. That's 50x what the CC1101 in the flipper maxes out at
If you want to search for a particular signal of interest (ie why does turning on my LED lamp open my garage door), that's more spectrum you can view at once, about 3x wider than what an RTL-SDR can receive. Similarly, you can view the entirety of a 30MHz wide emission as opposed to only seeing pieces of it.
You could monitor two different narrow bandwidth signal sources that are within ~30MHz of each other simultaneously, ie the 101.5FM broadcast channel and 121.5 airband guard channel. This provides the capabilities of something like a police radio scanner, covering the entire VHF or UHF land mobile band but without having to stop listening to find another signal and the ability to record the entire spectrum capture to disk so you can review all concurrent transmissions separately at a later time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterfall_plot#/media/File:SDR...
Above is a spectrum plot of an FM broadcast station using wide FM modulation and with some digital sub carriers on either side for song info etc. Other stations will be to the left and right of it and the "bandwidth" of the receiver determines how wide the plot you can view is.
One thing to consider is that the payload will be encrypted so you wont be really able to tell apart what is the rolling code. Hopefully fobs have stronger encryption so collecting enough sniffs and analyzing is insufficient (looking at tesla with their 64bit encryption, hopefully they upgraded).
Honda replay myth mentioned in the article is BS, it was popularized by ppl faking a simple replay attack while doing a more complicated one. If you record the fob command and the car never receives it, of course you can immidiatly after replay it to the car and car will accept it since RC is valid. But if you're sniffing while car is receiving it, RC gets updated. If Honda didn't have RC, it would have been far worse than the KIA boys (overriding immobilizer protection and hotwiring the car) issue that did a lot of damage to KIA in US.