DARPA challange: Can you program a radio to dominate the spectrum? | Hacker News Reader

DARPA challange: Can you program a radio to dominate the spectrum?

darpa.mil

120 pointscr4zy37 comments

I thought the challenge was "can you waste billions of dollars over decades and keep 30 year old radios in the field, stalling all progress", handily won by JTRS.

(This is somewhat sour grapes, but JTRS really was one of the worst run programs in the history of the military. It got lapped by commercial SDR 2-3 times, and then, because it was the "program of record" for radios, went out of its way to block deployment of other radio systems in Iraq/Afghanistan. The USMC eventually was able to deploy their own hacked up wifi + satellite system in spite of this, and the Army, etc. switched to a bunch of commercial radios. Due to JTRS, though, there was a period where people were actually using FRS, those unencrypted short-range things, for military use.)

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/how-to...

I'll jump on the JTRS hate bandwagon! One of my first jobs as a programmer was working on a JTRS/SCA CORBA-based platform. It was the first time the phrase "a camel is a horse designed by committee" really sunk in.

I think I actually know people who died due to cincgars vs other radio incompatibility. :(

A proper feint requires proper resources.

Something similar and very interesting that's used by ham radio operators every day: Automatic Link Exchange[1]. The system dynamically monitors many different frequencies (which have different propagation characteristics) to determine the best way for two parties to communicate, and automatically makes the connection. This is different from what DARPA needs, but still somewhat similar and definitely interesting. It's also one of the newer things in ham radio that a lot of hams don't know about.

1. http://hflink.com/alehamradio/

A direct link to the actual challenge, with more information.

(http://www.darpa.mil/spectrumchallenge/)

> Can you engineer software-based radios that transmit data faster than a competitor using identical hardware?

The [rules], [q&a], and [register] tabs are not clickable yet. I guess this is going to be more interesting when we know what the rules actually are. What kind of traffic and 'jamming' are you competing against? What frequencies are available to you?

This strikes me as a much better idea than the standard process of awarding a cost-plus contract to a military contractor and then watching as costs blow out.

DARPA's usual approach is to find some research group with a record of being brilliant and getting good results, and give them enough money and an ambitious-but-probably-possible goal. They're a surprisingly efficient government agency.

I'd reserve judgment until something actually comes out of it... More generally, "prize funding" isn't a practical mechanism for building real defense projects. Nobody who knows what they are doing will incur huge capital costs for a mere chance at some prize money.

Tell that to Sebastian Thrun (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sebastian_Thrun), whose work on the Google driverless car project (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_driverless_car) and current position as a Google Fellow owes so much to his successful work on previous DARPA challenges (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge).

Granted, the challenges cited above didn't directly provide any market-ready products, but the practically-minded research and development they induced significantly advanced the algorithmic and engineering know-how available to those looking to create marketable artifacts. More generally, reputation is hugely important among researchers and head-to-head competition is a cost-effective way to generate and distribute reputation.

It is almost certainly the case that Sebastian Thrun's research was paid for by the US government in the form of research grants to academic institutions, and student tuition.

So yes, prize money works great if you're already paying for research, and you just want to prod the direction of that research a bit.

The 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge [1], a self-driving-car competition, was extremely successful. Winning entrants spent far more than the prize of $2 million - predominantly funded by sponsorship from companies interested in self-driving vehicle technology.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge

Not a great example. A lot of the work on DARPA grand challenge was done by universities, which as a group are heavily funded by the federal government.

As I understand it most university projects don't get much cash from the university itself. In general STEM research is funded by grant money/sponsorship from industry that academics raise themselves. Often it's the academic/research group that then pays the university!

Admittedly the two leading teams did have a bunch of undergraduate students working on them, which offsets their labor costs - and the univesity usually supplies some resources.

Self driving cars is far more sexy project than this. The PR that universities got from that will be way way more than for this.

On the contrary, it has an excellent historical record. That's how we wound up with accurate clocks (for use at sea a couple of centuries ago).

The capital investment for inventions a couple of centuries ago is totally different than today. We live in the age of Big Science, where scientific advancement requires large teams of highly skilled people using very expensive equipment and instrumentation. A lot of the advancements in physics in the late 19th century and early 20th century were done by one or two researchers with small scale university resources. Today, these same sorts of advancements are done by international teams of scientists using particle accelerators that require massive government investment by multiple countries.

I don't agree. Past innovation looks like low-hanging fruit, but consider things like the breakthrough production of graphene using nothing more elaborate than scotch tape. given the advances in computing power, you can get a lot of good work with a potential reward of $100k or $1 million.

For anybody who wants to know more about this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longitude_Prize

I think you're right and wrong.

Coming up with awesome new SDR waveforms is something someone who is already funded can do, or something someone can do for fun (I'll probably enter). In this contest, the cost to enter is really low, and you'll get radio hackers who are interested in the problem. DARPA wins if it gets a few marginal people interested in the problem, not just if they come up with a new production waveform.

Contests work well if they're easy to enter or if winning brings you notoriety beyond the prize. Otherwise, you'd have to set an absurdly high prize to make it a high enough expectation to facilitate raising money for each of the teams, enough to have real competition -- like offering $1t for 51% of Osama Bin Laden in 2001, or $20t for a successful Mars colony for 100 users, etc.

The us military already has this. I wonder what would happen if someone brought HAVEQUICK to the contest? I might actually consider doing this to see if it wins. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAVE_QUICK

The winner will probably employ a similar hopping technique combined with "chirping" to transmit condensed bursts and phase modulation to better evade jamming.

Pushing the envelope in RRM? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_resource_management If anyone has links to info on the best currently known designs, please share.

> Any U.S. academic institution, business, or individual, is eligible to compete, with certain restrictions.

Any reason why it isn't open to people outside of USA ?

Presumably, because DARPA is funded by tax dollars and it would be embarrassing to have these go overseas; also, because the military may want to hire the people who made this, and getting a high security clearance for foreigners is a headache.

That still is a very very bad reason to don't "use" engineers outside the US

Sounds like a good reason to me 1. Security 2. DARPA exists for the US, and for US tax payers. I pay taxes to employ Americans, not Indians.

What would be a good reason?

Perhaps any engineers you employ are less likely to be employed by your enemies? It seems proven that greater trade between countries reduces risk of war, and employment might follow the same pattern.

Also, quite possible that your research money goes farther. If this produces greater progress per dollar, this might create greater security. But this might depend on whether you are developing offensive or defensive tools.

So if an italian has a better solution, then DARPA have failed on your point 1. because he can use that against americans (i.e block their spectrum), and DARPA won't know about it.

Citation on your point 2. Where does it say anywhere that Government can only spend it's money on employing Americans?

I am Italian (hey Volpe :-D), but I lived in the US for a little while.

I understand that what made American great is its ability to use talent from other countries, honestly US does NOT have the best scientists or engineers but it offer to the best mind the opportunities to shine, opportunities that we don't have in my country.

For most DARPA projects you have requirements for key people to have US citizenship, firewalls for foreigners, etc. it's the department of defense, there are a lot of national security implications.

They might allow non US citizens to compete as long as the primary point of contact for the team is eligible to compete. This is how I remember they did the Darpa shredder challenge.

DARPA is part of the US Department of Defense, so it makes sense that they award only Americans. On the other hand, I wish they made a special exception for Canadians...

I propose this thing: http://www.vtg.admin.ch/internet/vtg/de/home/verbaende/fub/f...

So, if I'm interested in getting started in software radio, can anyone recommend what I need to get started?

I'm checking this out now

http://gnuradio.org/

Any recommendations for hardware? Do I need to get a Ham Radio License?

Primer on Cheap Software Defined Radios

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4861199

To dominate a radio spectrum usualy ends up with who has the strongest transmitter.

BUT in todays digital age and more refined tunning of radio's into more decimal places. Then I believe the following approach would be the best approach for less power.

Pick your target spectrum range, Then using a highpower transmitter higher powered than the other as above to do a very granular spectrum hopping around the spectrum but at least transmitting on every channel within that spectrum at a period of frequency that would be greater than normal error corrected interferance by that your signal would then cover the spectrum range alocated but instead of having to do a wide band of the entire spectrum you are picking channels (by channels I mean frequency range that is not interfeared with by either side as you can have a transmission on wifi say that is on channel 3 and can be picked up faintly if your on channel 1, bad example but you should follow what I'm meaning by channel in this case of a spectrum block) at a time interval that would exceed error correction and as such rendering others use of the channel extreemly hard and with that all channels in the defined frequency range, aka spectrum.

Now by doing that you would need the least amount of power to block others use of that spectrum and at the same time have a very wide albeit spectrum hopping chunk of bandwith to use and abuse and the faster you make the spectrum hopping to break error handerling of others trying to use that range.

Of course with that approach you would have details to work on like frequency channels and how granular you defined those and also the level of error correction you wish to defeat. Remember if you want to compete with others digital transmissions then this is great BUT with analogue it may very well be a case that somebody talking would still be understandable with the level of interfearance. A look at signal type and how it would be analoguely(sic) interpreted is one aspect that may effect how you encode your data as you may end up disrupting the receaving speaker enough to impeede the other signals sound transmision. There is also the aspect of how long you stay on a channel at certain frequencies with some needing longer than others to transmit something usable and the fun of recieving the signal out of step as different frequencies propergate(travel) at different rates(speed) so that would cause out of step reception, though easily countered if your aware of that design aspect.

NOW there is a far far easier way and sadly I don't think it is what I would calla hacker approach and is more the script-kiddie solution. That would be to send a silly large pulse on the frequency so strong that it blows all the transmitters. Now you would need to inform your chaps ahead so they could switch of and fold there areils in half type of thing ahead of your radio nuke or more a radio DOS attack. Then they could setup ready afterwards and you would of blown all other recievers and with that the only people who can listern are those you want to listern. Not elegant, but certainly a partial solution that would be cheap to implement as it is that crude, hence not what I call a pure hacker solution. I also suspect the amount of power to do this would exceed the prize money being offered, so you would be pushed and indeed insane to build and test such an approach.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com