
Pocket FM - sauerbraten
http://www.pocket-fm.com/
======
gravypod
Is this someone's attempt at marketing SDR to the masses? This is nothing new,
and I'm surprised to see how little information they put forward about it.

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neilwillgettoit
It's just a low power FM station with a raspberry pi in it as a controller. It
would be highly illegal to use this device in most modern nations without a
license.

~~~
voltagex_
The Nokia N900 could broadcast short-range FM with RDS, I'm not sure what
advantages this has.

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neilwillgettoit
higher power. The n900's transmitter was 15nW (1.5e-8 W), which is why it was
legal. For a claimed 6km radius, I would assume this is about 3-7W output.

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zumatic
A 6km radius would fit quite well with schemes like Community Radio in the UK:

[http://consumers.ofcom.org.uk/tv-radio/radio/a-guide-to-
comm...](http://consumers.ofcom.org.uk/tv-radio/radio/a-guide-to-community-
radio/)

...still need a licence, of course.

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neilwillgettoit
This seems like a bad idea. It would make targeting dissent with kinetic means
very easy. It's one of the whole reasons that shortwave broadcasts are still
around.

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msandford
How so? What off the shelf guidance systems exist to home in on FM radio?

I'm sure there are tons of anti-SAM guidance packages which will steer
something towards a SAM transmitter, but that's in an entirely different
frequency band from what I remember.

Terminal guidance systems tend to be in the UHF and SHF bands, generally
gigahertz and up where as FM is VHF at about 100MHz.

It'd take a fair amount of work to re-engineer a guidance package to find such
a lower power FM transmitter and perform terminal guidance on it. Especially
when the world is awash in FM all around there too.

[http://thediplomat.com/2014/08/the-f-35-vs-the-vhf-
threat/](http://thediplomat.com/2014/08/the-f-35-vs-the-vhf-threat/)

~~~
bobowzki
It's this easy.

[http://youtu.be/NSC4Y8yA-jY](http://youtu.be/NSC4Y8yA-jY)

~~~
msandford
It's a very interesting talk but from what I saw that's not a terminal
guidance package by any means. The antennas would need to be too big to fit
into a missile. Also it doesn't work very well in an urban environment as the
end of the talk shows.

There's a huge difference between targeting the radar of an aircraft or a ship
or a mobile SAM site and targeting a cell phone.

~~~
neilwillgettoit
You don't need a complex guidance package when traditional direction finding
and triangulation will produce coordinates that can be used to direct
artillery, air strikes, IED, etc. Sigint targeting is quite common.

