Cyberspectrum

Cyberspectrum SDR Meetup

The Bay Area SDR Meetup will serve as a forum to exchange knowledge and ideas related to Software Defined Radio (the software and hardware), and generally aim to get people excited about all the applications that can be realised with the technology. At each meetup, attendees will have the opportunity to present their work/ideas to the group.

Engineers, enthusiasts, hobbyists and people of all experience levels are welcome, no matter what your software/hardware background. Everyone is welcome to submit their ideas/presentations to the pool. For each meetup, a fixed number will be chosen to fit the format. Currently there will be a short show-and-tell section, followed by two 20 minute presentations (e.g. an introduction to an SDR topic and analysis of a mystery signal), and then to conclude a 40 minute in-depth presentation on an application. Suggestions/alterations to this format are welcome of course!

Meetup locations will alternate between the South Bay and San Francisco. Meetup presentations will be recorded and posted online (although you can opt out if you wish).

More Information and Upcoming Events: http://www.meetup.com/Cyberspectrum/

Bay Area Software Defined Radio #1

Live Stream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUGr_Z04SKs

• Kevin Reid (@switchborg): "A Visual Introduction to DSP for SDR"

A tour of DSP topics relevant to implementation of simple software-defined radios. Focuses on visual explanations of fundamental manipulations of digital signals, including analytic signals, frequency shifting, sampling rates, filtering, and the discrete Fourier transform. http://switchb.org/kpreid/

• @SigBlips: the 'baudline' signal analyser, and some interesting signals

Bay Area Software Defined Radio #2

Live Stream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tdn6LDeAdHo

• Nick Foster @bistromath

Satellite communications with GNU Radio, SDR hardware, homebrew antennas and satellite tracking.

• Josh Myer @xek

A couple months back, some friends and I captured a bunch of RF telemetry from a rocket launch down at Vandenburg AFB, down by LA. I'll talk about how we decided what to capture, what we captured, and how we analyzed the many, many gigabytes of RF that wound up on a hard disk that morning.

• Jonathon Pendlum @SDRJon

RFNoC (RF Network on Chip), a new framework for Ettus third generation devices (X300 & E300) that aims to make FPGA acceleration in SDRs more easily accessible. I will cover some background on FPGAs and their use in SDR, the motivation and design of RFNoC, and conclude with a few live demos.

Bay Area Software Defined Radio #3

Live Stream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFBkX4CNb08

• Julian Arnold (AKA Perpetual Intern of the Month, @broadcrap):

A discussion on creating a simple SDR Doppler RADAR, OR decoding WiFi[masked]a packets - which one will he choose!?

• Derek Kozel (@derekkozel):

"Digital modulation schemes such as Phase Shift Keying (PSK) convert data bits to analog signals for transmission. This mapping is known as a constellation. For simple schemes, optimal constellations can be calculated, but for higher-order modulation schemes with more points, it becomes very difficult to mathematically determine an optimal constellation. Evolutionary algorithms provide a simple and pragmatic way to find good answers without advanced knowledge of communications theory. This talk shows a start-to-finish implementation, including an introduction to digital signals and evolutionary algorithms."

• Alex Ray (@machinaut & Team Lunarnaut):

"We'll be talking about some of the radios, antennas and protocols we're working on as part of the just-started NASA Cube Quest Challenge, a competition to get high data rates to small satellites far away from the Earth.

Our team is still in the very early stages, but we've been building and testing antennas, as well as experimenting with modulation schemes. Along those lines, SDRs are great for out needs because we can be extremely flexible with protocols, bands, antennas, and more!

We'll show off what we've been working on so far, and can talk about what we plan on doing next."

Bay Area Software Defined Radio #4

Live Stream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iq07aQaB8mM

• Julian Arnold (@broadcrap) will talk in depth about building a Doppler RADAR with cantennas and SDR

• Ief Kox (@iefkox) will talk from the other side of the world about MultiPSK and use it to analyse all manner of interesting signals: ACARS (HFDL, VDL), STANAG 4285, ALE, AMTOR Navtex, Wefax, DGPS, SSTV and more!

• Jesus Molina (@verifythentrust) will present on "Wardriving in the age of the Internet of Things with SDR":

In this talk I will present information on how to discover and map radio devices utilizing SDR, and I will present a new concept: Warwatching (yeah, watching IoT devices in real time!). Round 10 years ago we drove around picking up wireless signals from WIFI access points. Tools like Kismet were used to collect relevant information, and the data was then post processed to draw heat maps. Then Google crashed the party with their ever present cars, and with increasingly pervasive dynamic AP (phone hotspots, drones) it doesn’t make much sense anyway.

But SDR opens a new world for us: Wardriving in ANY frequency range. The amount of devices equipped with radio transmitting capabilities have increased, and is time to create new tools for discovery and pentesting in the age of the IoT. With SDR we can detect, listen and interact with several “static” radio devices (cell towers, FM stations, etc), and also we can “see” dynamic short range devices (drones, Bluetooth) and even actually watch them using augmented reality!. I will provide a short demonstration and the road ahead.

Bay Area Software Defined Radio #5

Live Stream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxiphlitrAQ

• Kevin Reid (@switchbord): "An Update to a Visual Introduction to DSP"

• Matt Ettus: "Synchronisation and MIMO demystified"

Beyond a single radio, there are multiple antenna systems, geographically separated systems, and all manner of multi-radio configurations in-between. Matt will talk about what is necessary to make these systems work, and the different levels of timing & synchronisation involved.

• Martin Braun (@braun_noise): "The SDR Mythbusters: Is #cyberspectrum hard to do?"

SDR has a reputation for being very difficult. Is this actually true? GNU Radio developer Martin Braun gives a tour through a typical development cycle and the tools GNU Radio provides to make development as smooth as possible.

This talk is geared mostly towards enthusiasts who are looking start their own GNU Radio development, and want to know exactly which resources are available.

Bay Area Software Defined Radio #6

Live Stream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYFalvzo-nk

• Harvind Samra (CTO and Co-Founder of Range Networks):

"OpenBTS: A Software-Defined Mobile Network"

The OpenBTS software is a Linux application that uses a software-defined radio to present a standard 3GPP air interface to user devices, while simultaneously presenting those devices as SIP endpoints to the Internet. This forms the basis of a new type of wireless network which promises to expand coverage to unserved and underserved markets while unleashing a platform for telecom innovation.

• Jason Abele:

"Software Defined Radio without the Radio, using GNU Radio and a sound card to develop a receiver for atomic time from WWVB"

We will talk a little about DIY VLF/LF antennas, the history of WWVB and atomic clocks, and demonstrate how to use GNU Radio to turn a cheap SDR rig into a very expensive clock.

Bay Area Software Defined Radio #7

Live Stream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BoFOt9AUWuE

• Moritz Fischer: A quick show-and-tell preview into decoding DECT using GNU Radio
• Surya Satyavolu: RADAR-Guided Wirelessly-Controlled Automated Driving

Surya will cover the technical problems to be solved to realize automated driving. It will focus on achieving reliable lateral guidance using RADAR and hard-real time longitudinal control using wireless, as well as current advances in RADAR technology that would help in realizing the vision.

• Balint Seeber: Walk-through on creating a simple wireless video streaming system using a webcam & GNU Radio

Bay Area Software Defined Radio #8

Live Stream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsDpMffRafg

• Matt Reilly: "SoDaRadio - A General Purpose Transceiver"

http://sodaradio.sourceforge.net/Site/SoDaRadio.html

• Josh Myer: "Decoding Radio Data System (RDS) from FM broadcast stations"

...is a great introductory in-depth SDR project. Josh will walk through his implementation in IPython, starting with sample capture and ending with decoding some of the RDS protocol frames.

Josh lives in the radio noise mess that is San Francisco, and is currently working on data acquisition and signal processing for a biofeedback product. He’s also in the beginning stages of a few radio capture and direction finding projects. You can find more of his bite-sized radio projects at his SDR Snippets page: http://www.joshisanerd.com/projects/sdr_snippets/

Bay Area Software Defined Radio #9

Live Stream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBfBnPPcuJw

• Martin Braun's to-be-regular update on GNU Radio news

• Tom Tsou: "A Guided Tour of LTE on SDRs"

Tom will speak about LTE fundamentals, the many available stacks that can run with SDRs, what their capabilities are, and what the future holds. He will also do some live demos!

• Moritz Fischer: Decoding DECT with GNU Radio - update

Bay Area Software Defined Radio #10

Live Stream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eebEKbdFL-g

• "Using SDR & GNU Radio in Radio Astronomy" by Richard Prestage, NRAO

• Tim O'Shea on some more cool GNU Radio hackery

http://oshearesearch.com/tag/lambda-blocks/

GNU Radio Lambda blocks are a simplification of pure-python blocks for GNU Radio which allow for writing a new block from within GRC with a simple python lambda expression. We'll demonstrate the great signal processing hackery that can achieved with the stream and message versions of this block!

• "PSK Modems in GNU Radio" by Kiran Karra

https://kirankarra.wordpress.com/2015/08/26/qpsk-burst-receiver-synchronization/

PSK Modems in GNU Radio have typically used tracking loops which take time to converge and do not leverage reference signals, through re-thinking the approach to PSK demodulation in a message and burst based context we demonstrate a robust new way to build modems!

• "Hacking an RF Shock Collar" by Tim K

GNU Radio is an awesome tool for reverse engineering, but people seem to get stuck somewhere between "Complex to Mag", Audacity, and MS Paint. It's not as hard to get packets out in "real time" as you might think. In this session, I'll build a transceiver from the ground up for the shock collar from DEFCON 23's Wireless Village.

Bay Area Software Defined Radio #11

Live Stream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tG70c3Zadek

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Bay Area Software Defined Radio #12

Live Stream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1K6LUAZpaWg

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Bay Area Software Defined Radio #13

Live Stream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEMYA-nzATM

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Bay Area Software Defined Radio #14

Live Stream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxPv2bSli6o

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Bay Area Software Defined Radio #15

Live Stream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JEv2Yq_sc8

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