Lime Microsystems has opened pre-launch registrations for a crowdfunding campaign to deliver a new LMS8001 Companion Board – a four-channel frequency shifter which can boost the frequency range of a software-defined radio up to 10GHz.
“Lime’s LMS8001 Companion Board can extend the frequency range of any of the boards in the LimeSDR family up to 10GHz,” the company explains. It’s a great match for the LimeSDR Mini 2.0, creating an affordable SDR platform with continuous coverage from 10MHz to 10GHz.
“A similar add-on board was available for a limited time during the launch of the original Lime SDR Mini back in 2017. Now that we’ve improved the previous design, we’re proud to bring it to a wide audience at long last. It will allow owners of LimeSDR boards from Mini to USB or PCIe/QPCIe to greatly improve their frequency coverage.”
The board is, as the name suggests, built around Lime Micro’s LMS8001A chip, linked to an STMicroelectronics STM32F105 microcontroller. There’s a USB Type-C connector for power and control signals, a six-pin header for easy jumper access, and UFL and SMA connectors for antennas. Previously, the boards were only available as engineering samples – but Lime Micro says that the Companion Board is now reached “production status,” including a few tweaks from user feedback including band retuning and the move from USB Micro-B to USB Type-C.
The board design and firmware sources have already been published to GitHub under the Solderpad Hardware Licence v2.1 and the Apache Licence 2.0 respectively, while those looking to pick up a board themselves can sign up on Crowd Supply to be notified when the campaign goes live within the next week or two.
Holy Grail Labs has announced an adapter which lets you install a LimeSDR XTRX software-defined radio into an M.2 slot – using two PCI Express lanes to ensure maximum performance.
“This allows you to install a LimeSDR XTRX into an M.2 slot in your computer,” the company explains of the accessory. “This correctly handles the PCIe x2 connection from the radio, which is not supported by either standard mPCIe [mini-PCI Express] slots or generic M.2 adapters.”
The LimeSDR XTRX was launched as a successor to the Fairwaves XTRX Rev. 5, boasting a selection of improvements to the board and the release of design files and documentation under an ope-source licence. Its mPCIe form factor, though, may not be suitable for all computers, and with an increasing number of single-board computers coming with M.2 slots an adapter may be required for some deployments.
Holy Grail Labs’ design is made specifically for the LimeSDR XTRX, and connects two PCI Express lanes where generic mPCIe to M.2 adapters may only carry one – ensuring the board can reach its rated throughput. The company warns, however, that it should only be used with the LimeSDR XTRX and not earlier Fairwaves versions – and that the adapter may not fit all M.2 slots, depending on surrounding components, “as it is wider and thicker than the M.2 specification.”
The adapter is available on the Holy Grail Labs store now, priced at £33/$42 excluding LimeSDR XTRX; a discussion thread is available on the MyriadRF forum.
Researchers from the University of Michigan, Middle Tennessee State University, the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology have published a report into the SunRISE Ground Radio Lab project – an effort to monitor solar radio bursts by installing software-defined radio systems into high schools.
“The Sun Radio Interferometer Space Experiment (SunRISE) Ground Radio Lab (GRL) is a Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics (STEAM) project sponsored by NASA’s SunRISE mission and organised by the University of Michigan College of Engineering,” the team explains. “The project aims to engage and train the next generations of scholars. To achieve this, the project deployed antennas to 18 high schools nationwide to observe solar radio bursts (SRB). SRBs are defined as low-frequency radio emissions emanated by accelerated electrons associated with extreme solar activity, including solar flares and coronal mass ejections (CMEs)”
The researchers deployed dual dipole and long wavelength antennas (DDAs and LWAs) at schools while recruiting and training pupils and undergraduate students to contribute to antenna design, fabrication, and installation, in addition to data collection, categorisation, and analysis. “DDA is ideal for affordably monitoring emission from the Sun, as well as Jupiter and the galaxy,” the team explains, “[while] Long Wavelength Array (LWA) is a radio telescope system designed for the observation of SRBs and other astrophysical phenomena at low frequencies.
“Our results were found to agree with previous studies,” the report concludes. “Through SunRISE GRL, an ever-expanding catalog of SRBs is being collected by high school students nationwide, curated by a team of solar physics experts, and made publicly available to the scientific community to make progress toward the SunRISE mission’s objectives.”
The full report has been published under open-access terms in the journal Earth and Space Science.
EUMETSAT has announced the successful launch of the Meteosat Third Generation Sounder 1 (MTG-S1) satellite, Europe’s first geostationary sounder satellite – designed to deliver atmospheric data for early warning of extreme weather events.
“MTG-S1 will provide entirely new types of data products that will support specialists across EUMETSAT member states in detecting signs of atmospheric instability even before clouds begin to form,” says EUMETSAT director-generatl Phil Evans of the launch. “Combined with data from the MTG imaging satellites, it will, for the first time, offer a space-based view of the full lifecycle of convective storms. This will provide tremendous support to national meteorological services in carrying out their vital work, helping to save lives, reduce disruption, and strengthen resilience.
“The effects of the climate crisis are not distant threats: they are already being felt across Europe – through more frequent storms, longer heatwaves, and shifting climate patterns. MTG-S1 will support more timely warnings, safer travel decisions, more effective emergency response, and support informed action.”
MTG-S1 is Europe’s first geostationary meteorological sounder satellite, carrying two key mission payloads: the Infrared Sounder and the European Union’s Copernicus Sentinel-4 Ultraviolet Visible Near-Infrared spectrometer. The former will scan almost 2,000 thermal wavelengths every half-hour, while the latter will provide hourly data on pollutants and aerosols.
“These two groundbreaking missions are set to change the way we forecast both severe weather and the quality of air over Europe,” says ESA director of Earth observation programmes Simonetta Cheli. “It is thanks to the outstanding work our teams have done with EUMETSAT, the European Commission and dozens of European industry partners, that we are able to now look forward to more accurate and timely ways of predicting storm events and air pollution.”
Updates on the satellite are available on the EUMETSAT website.
Researchers from Xi’an Jiaotong University, the Hon Kong Polytechnic University, Xidian University, and Nanjing University have come up with a new twist on TEMPEST-style data exfiltration – by encoding videos which turn monitor cables into LoRa antennas.
“Electromagnetic (EM) covert channels pose significant threats to computer and communications security in air-gapped networks. Previous works exploit EM radiation from various components (e.g., video cables, memory buses, CPUs) to secretly send sensitive information,” the researchers explain of their project. “These approaches typically require the attacker to deploy highly specialised receivers near the victim, which limits their real-world impact.
“This paper reports a new EM covert channel, TEMPEST-LoRa, that builds on Cross-Technology Covert Communication (CTCC), which could allow attackers to covertly transmit EM-modulated secret data from air-gapped networks to widely deployed operational LoRa receivers from afar. We reveal the potential risk and demonstrate the feasibility of CTCC by tackling practical challenges involved in manipulating video cables to precisely generate the EM leakage that could readily be received by third-party commercial LoRa nodes/gateways.”
Experimentation showed that the system, which encodes data to be exfiltrated into video files which when played cause electromagnetic emissions on the monitor cable – carefully crafted to be valid LoRa packets, which can be captured and decoded using low-cost off-the-shelf hardware. “[We] can reliably decode secret data modulated by the EM leakage from a video cable at a maximum distance of 87.5m or a rate of 21.6kbps,” the team notes. “We note that the secret data transmission can be performed with monitors turned off (therefore covertly).”
A preprint of the team’s paper is available on Cornell’s arXiv server; the project source code is available on GitHub under the permissive MIT licence.
Retired engineer and radio ham Jim Matthews has designed a compact, low-cost transmitter for “fox hunting” – built using a walkie-talkie module modified to transmit a constant beeping.
“There is a popular activity in ham radio called ‘fox hunting,'” Jim explains. “This is where you hid a small transmitter in an outdoor location and then the hunter uses a radio direction finder to locate the transmitter. Kids and teenagers really enjoy this and it’s a fun introduction to the radio hobby.
“To build a simple beacon transmitter I decided to use an inexpensive toy walkie talkie module called the SR-T300, which I purchased online. This module only needs a battery, speaker, microphone, and a couple buttons to become a complete walkie talkie. However I only wanted it to transmit a beeping sound, which would be perfect for this activity.
“Wanting to keep it as simple, small and inexpensive as possible. I chose to use a 3mm 1Hz blinking LED as the timer and assembled it nose to nose with a phototransistor. The SR-T300 has a call function, which just transmits a beep when that pin is connected to +3V. So I connected the phototransistor to that pin. I encased the phototransistor and the LED with shrink tubing and some black acrylic paint to prevent interference from ambient light. I also connected the PTT (push to talk) pin to +3v so it would transmit continuously while connected to the battery.”
More information is available on Jim’s Hackaday.io project page.
KrakenRF has announced the impending launch of a crowdfunding campaign for the Discovery Drive, a motorised antenna rotator built with the company’s Discovery Dish in mind.
“Discovery Drive is a low-cost, high-quality automatic satellite dish rotator designed for use with Discovery Dish and other antennas of similar size and weight, like Wi-Fi grid and Yagi antennas,” KrakenRF’s Carl Laufer explains. “A motorised rotator allows you to use a satellite dish or directional antenna to track and receive signals from polar orbiting satellites, which quickly move across the sky. It also lets you switch swiftly between geostationary satellites without manually realigning the dish. And, it’s easy to set up, too—no messing about with expensive separate controllers!
“A motorised rotator like Discovery Drive enables precise tracking of fast-moving polar orbiting satellites using a satellite dish or directional antenna. Examples of polar orbiting weather satellites you can track include NOAA POES, METEOR-M2, METOP, and FENGYUN. Depending on your location, you may also have access to other interesting satellites that dump data over specific regions. Amateur radio operators can also use Discovery Drive to track amateur radio satellites with Yagi antennas.”
The rotator provides up to 12.25Nm of torque, Carl says, and provides rotation from -360° to +360° Azimuth and 0-90° elevation at a 1.5 revolutions per minute (RPM) Azimuth and 0.25 RPM elevation speed and with ±1.5° positioning accuracy. Control is handled by an Espressif ESP32 microcontroller, which provides a Wi-Fi connection and browser-based user interface – though there’s also serial-over-USB support for wired control.
The Discovery Drive’s crowdfunding campaign is set to launch on Crowd Supply soon, with interested parties invited to sign up on the campaign page to be notified when it goes live; firmware source code has already been published on GitHub under an unspecified license.
A team of scientists from La Sapienza University of Rome’s department of computer science have released a paper detailing a new twist on using Wi-Fi for presence detection: WhoFi, which is able to re-identify individuals moving between Wi-Fi networks.
“Person re-identification is a key and challenging task in video surveillance,” the team explains. “While traditional methods rely on visual data, issues like poor lighting, occlusion, and suboptimal angles often hinder performance. To address these challenges, we introduce WhoFi, a novel pipeline that utilises Wi-Fi signals for person re-identification.
“Biometric features are extracted from Channel State Information (CSI) and processed through a modular Deep Neural Network (DNN) featuring a Transformer-based encoder. The network is trained using an in-batch negative loss function to learn robust and generalisable biometric signatures. Experiments on the NTU-Fi dataset show that our approach achieves competitive results compared to state-of-the-art methods, confirming its effectiveness in identifying individuals via Wi-Fi signals.”
The WhoFi system works in any lighting conditions, the researchers explain, can “see” through walls and other obstacles, and can provide enough data to provide a system for recognising if that individual has been seen before. “The core insight is,” the team says, “as a Wi-Fi signal propagates through an environment, its waveform is altered by the presence and physical characteristics of objects and people along its path.
“These alterations, captured in the form of Channel State Information (CSI), contain rich biometric information. Unlike optical systems that perceive only the outer surface of a person, Wi-Fi signals interact with internal structures, such as bones, organs, and body composition, resulting in person-specific signal distortions that act as a unique signature.”
A preprint of the WhoFi paper is available on Cornell’s arXiv server.
The US Department of Energy (DoE)’s Brookhaven National Laboratory has announced that the “major item of equipment” phase of the Lunar Surface Electromagnetics Experiment-Night (LuSEE-Night) project has completed – bringing the lunar radio telescope one step closer to completion.
“I’m really proud of what the team managed to build,” says Brookhaven Lab’s Gabriella Carini, associate laboratory director for the Discovery Technologies Directorate. “With DoE’s support, we’ve built a telescope that I think truly advances the state of the art in the nascent field of space-based radio astronomy.”
The LuSEE-Night telescope is destined to be installed on the far side of the moon, where it will experience extreme temperature swings over a 28-hour day and night cycle – with the advantage that the moon itself will provide shielding from the noisy radio emanations of the Earth’s surface. This, its creators hope, will provide a quiet enough environment to spot the “Dark Ages Signal” – radio waves originating from around 380,000 years after the Big Bang, before the formation of planets and stars.
“This is a very powerful and flexible spectrometer that is packed with features, both in hardware and software,” says LuSEE-Night spokesperson Anže Slosar of the latest, and final, piece of major hardware to have been completed for the project. “The spectrometer can do calibration, adjust itself according to gain, and filter out its own radio interference. It’s a highly programmable instrument.”
The LuSEE-Night telescope is scheduled to be integrated into the Firefly Aerospace Blue Ghost 2 lander for a launch some time next year. More information is available on the BNL Cosmology & Astrophysics Group website.
Finally, maker Richard Durose has shown off a design for a compact signal injector – and is challenging others to see if they can make one even smaller.
“Over two years ago I designed and a built battery powered signal injector pen that fit into a pen,” Richard explains. “For some reason I was chatting with Detlef and he said he could make a smaller one. And from that came this idea: who can make the smallest signal injector?”
A typical signal injector draws power from the device on test, which would help get the size down – though Richard’s design uses an internal battery, allowing to to work without a connection to external power at the cost of making it a little harder to squeeze into the body of a pen. Whether dropping the battery will be considered a “valid” entry to the contest had not been confirmed at the time of writing.
More information, including how to enter, is available on Richard’s YouTube channel.