BlackRabbit1

I just (two days ago) ordered 3 pieces from the Aliexpress Espressif store. It got sipped.

Because Google is already picking patches from GOS ;-)

Attempt number 2000?

RTLSDRs only have a 8-Bit ADC that easily drown next to strong transmitters.

I remember the Ettus devices to be much much much more powerful.

I'm pretty sure that that WiFi-7 modems/routers have a similar modes up to 320MHz bandwidth.

The modems could be quite interesting as they are connected via PCIe which can eat a lot of bandwidth.

But they are very difficult (to almost impossible) to find if there isn't anything left in the firmware blob or device driver.

As far as I follow the research process it's currently quite difficult to get all data (like the 80MSPS@10-Bit showcase on Reddit) to a computer without a FPGA+USB3.

With the new ESP32-S31 we most likely can extract the I/Q data over its new 1 GBit/s interface. Guessing something around 20-40MSPS should work.

These hack will most likely will be a revolution for 13cm ham radio. With the new 5GHz ESP32 modules most likely also for 5cm. As all Espressif components are WiFi-qualified we can expect a very very stable and robust radio.

I ordered a few and waiting for Ali to deliver them to my lab.

I love NASA design of their space probe telemetry/control views.. lol.

It's so pure.

I always say: if you don't have your remote work agreement in your contract you'll be surprised soon.

Not only that, but the board wants all employees to go back to working a 40-hour week (the standard collective bargaining agreement is 35 hours).

But without an adjustment to their salaries.

Lol.

CoMaps behaves very very weirdly on GrapheneOS. Same with OrganicMaps.

Osmand and GMaps are working fine.

Waze is almost melting the poor thing. Beside of that working fine.

Blind Control for the C-Suite?

Addendum: GNSS-R (R=Reflectrometry) is also established science.

This way you can - for example - track water height of a river next to a station. You basically receive the direct GNSS signal and the reflected one. Then do magic math.

Due to the low orbit of the GPS/Galileo/etc. satellites the reflection is basically "scanning" over the area of interest with an ultra precise signal.

It doesn't require super-cooled radio stuff and can be done with off-the-shelf-gear.

That's cool.

Reminds me that scientists can use GPS to track earthquakes indirectly as it is interacting with the ionosphere: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s40623-025-02211-y

If you start lifting weight at the gym you quickly will feel the difference: your muscles recover much better during the set breaks.

If you want to have internet everywhere there is Starlink. Competing against it as hobbyist is a waste of time.

But having a small, low-power, lightweight messenger that uses an extremely robust (and thereby slow) mode to send and receive messages is an interesting niche. For VHF/UHF/SHF you can use LoRa.

> Why did you build in encryption that amateur-radio regulations in many countries don’t allow?

Encryption (in terms of hiding messages) is forbidden mostly.

But everything else is allowed: hashes, signing, etc.

Even the legislators really understand it. They are allowing encryption for remote controlling ham satellites. With proper signing even that would not be necessary (with only exception of key rotations maybe).

At least Deepseek V4 Flash does it very good.

Who invests a few tokens finding the hardcoded check?

AFAIR the EEPROM mostly uses the VideoCore instruction set.

That's huge.

Ham radio operators are still waiting for a full direct transatlantic QSO (=confirmed both-ways radio contact) on 2m/144MHz.

That's like hunting a unicorn with a golden horn - whoever does this first will earn a lot of fame in this niche hobby.

(for other frequencies like 50MHz this is more or less daily business doesn't earn more words than "yes was a nice day with good propagation")

Beacon stations are on both sides and they are blasting with a lot of power for quite a while now. But far away from the x kilowatt powers radio stations are using.

If it's functional: that's a breakthrough.

But: the PCB itself is not looking beautiful in terms of routing and a lot of schematic details yet. Horrible to to be more honest. But that's a minor issue.

I'm not overly shocked. 90% of creating PCBs is copying reference schematics from vendor datasheets and connecting them. That's LLM territory. This mostly failed for now as they just did pdf2text and killed all documents.

The last 10% are brutal (HF, EMC, high frequency multi-layer designs, etc.). But I managed LLMs to automatically create ngspice models using vision onto datasheets.. lol

You can use Deepseek from EU-only hosters. DS is openweight.

You can use Asian Opensource models from EU-only hosters. Zero problems - they are around for a while now.

You still can use EU-Hosted Opensources models like from Tensorix.

LLMs are fun until you have to break up a devices that use encrypted firmware files and non-documented interfaces.. that you are back in the past ;-)

But for the rest: Yes. They will be eaten alive by the latest generation of LLMs. I use DS-Flash 4.1 a lot for this. A big helper.

All European car manufacturers pull a crazy amount of telemetry data from your car.

Either via permanent 4G/5G link or during service intervals in the shop.

Source: I analyzed these data as an intern for one.

Ah good old Tuya.

Played around with them a while go.

Found out you could do code execution while staying in the bootloader mode.. lol.

But wasn't able to extract the keys I wanted.

In terms of signal level?

Well.. that amount of bars you can see depending on the real signal level is just a SIM configuration. In the "newer" networks they aren't configured properly yet.

In Germany telcos using 700MHz for 5G a lot (also for LTE in non-5G regions and sometimes with DSS). So they can create a lot of coverage on rural areas or building penetration.

Telefonica didn't set their signallevel-to-bars-parameters on their SIMs correctly yet. Even directly next to a antenna you only see 1-2 bar although the signal level is maxing out.

Just because your phone shows 5G doesn't mean it's connected to a 5G station. It also can only be a signaled flag from a 4G station.

5G SA isn't still available for the broad masses yet.. and they are talking of 7G?

I had the chance to test it in Germany with Telefonica as it can be activated for free. It saves a lot of battery compared to 5G NSA. But they still had smaller problems with hand-overs to LTE and GSM.

Colleagues told me that the 5G NSA battery consumption problem is pretty much a solved problem with other basebands and only Pixels are famous for suffering this much.