
Universal Radio Hacker: investigate wireless protocols like a boss - happy-go-lucky
https://github.com/jopohl/urh
======
buserror
Looks fun! I did some reverse engineering for the RF sensors of my weather
station a few weeks back, I used gnuradio, audacity etc but it was all
'manual', ie feeding the .WAV capture file to my own program and trying to
find the decoding [0]. Turns out it was a _known_ protocol of course, but it
was still fun! Next time I know where to look for the proper tools, this looks
awesome!

[0]: My RF/MQTT bridge for switches and sensors:
[https://github.com/buserror/rf_bridge](https://github.com/buserror/rf_bridge)

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heywire
Nice, thanks for sharing! I'll have to check this out. Not sure how I missed
hearing about this one when I was working on understanding the mesh network
protocol for the water and electric meters on the side of my house. Aside from
GNU Radio, which has already been mentioned, Inspectrum also proved to be
invaluable to me.

~~~
kvajjha
Can you elaborate on the mesh network part? I've recently discovered mesh
networking. What do you recommend as a good beginner project?

~~~
heywire
Sure. The electric and water meters used by the city I live in are by a
company called Elster. They use the name EnergyAxis or EA_LAN to describe the
mesh network. Either of those should return hours of reading material on a
Google search. The short version is that each electric meter communicates on
the ISM 915MHz band using the Texas Instruments CC11xx chip, and relays
messages from meter to meter until it reaches the "gatekeeper", which is tied
to a WAN and to the city's infrastructure.

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platz
what is the advantage of this over something like
[http://gnuradio.org](http://gnuradio.org) ?

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bsder
Ever tried to install gnuradio?

It's a nightmare of twisty dependencies. You can either run the obsolete
version in your distro or be prepared for a world of pain.

And it's made even worse because Qt decided they couldn't be bothered with
binary compatibility so a whole bunch of things dependent upon Qt all broke
and lots of things now all need to get fixed.

~~~
jokr004
No kidding! It's a complete nightmare to set up, urh is significantly simpler
to set up and to use.. though of course the other side of that is it's not as
powerful as gnuradio

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TeMPOraL
A question to RF people here - if I want to snoop on the 433MHz and 868MHz
signals in the air, what's the cheapest setup I can get that would let me do
some useful work? I've been reading up on the RTL-SDR thing, but there seems
to be so many variables to consider that I can't even estimate what's the
minimum set of hardware required, and whether the cheap modules are of any
use.

~~~
tomfanning
Probably depends on how much bandwidth you are interested in seeing at any
given time.

If < ~2MHz and budget is everything, this sort of thing will get you started
[http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/272267647631](http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/272267647631)

These guys have iterated on the RTL stick a bit, though expect to pay a bit
more: [http://www.rtl-sdr.com/buy-rtl-sdr-dvb-t-dongles/](http://www.rtl-
sdr.com/buy-rtl-sdr-dvb-t-dongles/)

If < 8MHz, try this [http://www.sdrplay.com](http://www.sdrplay.com) (Not an
RTL stick, performance FAR better. I own this, it's great.) I notice they have
a new model out.

Above that, sky's the limit. Filters are possibly useful on the TV stick but
by no means essential.

Antennas - all depends on proximity. If you're in the same room as your RF
source, a bit of wire will do, for all but the weakest signals. Beyond that,
it depends what you're doing.

My recommendation: Buy the £7 stick, see if it gets the job done for you. If
not, try the SDRPlay unit. I own both, they're both good and will likely get
the job done.

Software: HDSDR [http://www.hdsdr.de/](http://www.hdsdr.de/) SDR Console
[http://sdr-radio.com/](http://sdr-radio.com/) (current beta is excellent with
SDRPlay RSP 1)

No affiliation to any links posted.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Thanks! I'll start with the stick then. I am afraid to spend triple digit sums
on more hardware that I don't yet know if I'll end up using much, but I wasn't
sure if cheaper options are usable at all.

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somedudeonHN
This is genuinely awesome. I can't wait to try it out!

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theRhino
maybe pair with an rtlsdr for some low-cost input?

