6GHz Wi-Fi Spectrum HackRF

hey everyone now I've mentioned a couple of times that I'm working on the 3D Spectrum analyzer and you've seen bits of it in my videos before so here's how it currently looks here that's just the FM Radio band and I've now got a couple of buttons working here like I can um set the gain and stuff so if I drop the gain light down you'll see the signal will will disappear and all that sort of thing and I can mess around with the frequency and whatnot like that but the way that works is by taking samples then calculating fft on them to find the frequency components now I recently did a video on on how that works so you check that out if you want some background on that but the problem is That's That device there is one of these common RTL Str dongles and they only have two megahertz of bandwidth now I want to look at much much wider spectrum and especially I'm going to use it for Wi-Fi so um that just doesn't work so what I'm going to do what I have done is done a bit of work with the hack RF now the hack RF has 20 megahertz bandwidth which still isn't enough if you want to go cover the whole five gig band okay so I've done it a different way than grabbing samples and doing fft so I'll show you how I've done that and there's a program for the hack RF called hack RF sweep and if I just run that there you see a lot of stuff but if I put a frequency range in it so um to 2.4 gig to 2.5 gig and I'll just stop it what you can see is it's me it's measuring uh Power from in this line here between that frequency and that frequencies so it's just gone up a bit and these are the values along the way in DB and then it does the next little bit and goes up to 2.5 whatever I said then goes back to 2.4 so it's sweeping really really fast and you can see down the bottom here 80 sweeps a second now that went across the whole 2.4 gig band from 2.4 to 2.5 which is 100 Meg 80 times a second and it's better because it's doing that by sweeping across pretty much like a traditional Spectrum analyzer that we've had for years that didn't work off fft they had a voltage controlled oscillator which um it's oscillated at all the frequencies and swept through them and then mixed with whatever signal was coming in and showed whatever signal was there that's pretty much what that's doing so what I wanted to do was use that program from within Python and use that up to six gig because this thing's rated to six gig but it actually goes up to seven so what I'm going to try tonight is to see how well this performs in the six gigahertz range because now we've got Wi-Fi 6E which is kiwi for sexy that runs in the six gigahertz band so that's what I'm going to try and do so I'll show you my dodgy program at the moment Which is far from done but I'll just give you a bit of a look okay now this is my current working version which is a bit rough but that's the whole 2.4 gig bandwidth being displayed there at 80 odd frames a second so um you can see a bit of stuff here I'll just pause it when something happens now as I said it's not really clear at the moment um I saw that was Wi-Fi frames and bits there but what I'll do is I'll turn these Bluetooth headphones on and just put them near there and I'll pause it you probably didn't notice it but the stuff there the problem is I haven't got any averaging on here yet that's why it's a bit hard to show but I'll turn them off and I'll do an eye perf test to the laptop here just put the laptop near it and run iperf um so it's from the AP down to here so if I run that you can see clearly there's the stuff there on channel one okay and as I said I can pause this get right into it and and really see what's going on there's too many lines on there at the moment I should reduce the amount of lines um but that's that now if I go the other direction so from the laptop to the AP because it's transmitting right next to this thing that'll be a bit stronger so you can see that there in fact what I'll do I'll reduce the number of lines so just give me a second that's about 200 lines or something there okay we're back and now it's 50 lines so you can see it's it's just flying along there and same as before I can pause it and get in there and have a look um and see what's going on now one thing you might notice if you are quick and clever see if I can pause an example for you you see here it's got the whole sort of uh what you'd expect that's probably a beacon because of the shape of that so it looks like a single carrier so it looks low bit rate which wouldn't be one of my beacons but I can I can see that's what that is but what you might see if you can tell is here so you can see this Frame here it's up in amplitude there then down in the middle and then up again now that's because this works fundamentally different to an fft one like I said so before with fft it grabs a whole bunch of samples in time and then calculates fft so if it happened to catch a frame the whole frame will be displayed but because this works like a traditional spec and by sweeping across as it was sweeping there there might have been some some RF there but these Wi-Fi frames are so quick it was probably off by the time the sweep got to there and that might have been the next frame along there so it will look different but um that doesn't worry me so much it's just a different way of working so you can still see what's what's going on let's stop that stop that there so that's what I've got there but what I really wanted to do is make a six gigahertz Spectrum analyzer for new Wi-Fi and it just so happens that today I've got some new toys I've got some new Aruba APS that that run in six gig so I'm going to set these up and uh see if I can get a six six gig signal to look at and see how well the hack RF sees it okay so I've got a couple of 615s here and six five fives now these might be a bit overkill for this so I'll probably just stick with the 615s little 18. all right that's going to be the AP and what I'm going to do because I don't have any uh six gig clients I'm going to set two of these up as a mesh in six gig just so I can have some sort of six gig signal around here and see what it looks like all right so I'll set these up as a mesh and get back here I'm not going to go through how I do that because that's not the point of this video but I'm going to set them up as a mesh so that'll be on the wired side of the network and then it'll have a six gig link to this one if I can set it upright and then they'll just run that off the switch and put a laptop in here so I'll just set them up now and get back to you all right it's a new day so I've forgotten what I recorded yesterday so if I repeat myself well too bad anyway I've got some set up here so I'll show you what I've got right so over here I've got a mesh portal I ended up using the ap655s instead of the other ones anyway that's just wired into my um existing Network so that's the main land side of things over here I've got the six gig mesh going to this AP and that just feeds into the switch which is what's powering it and the only other thing I've got in the switch is this little host here to be an iperf server so I can do some iperf testing so I've got a six gig mesh link between those two APS with a host on the far side there now keep in mind this isn't an optimal setup I haven't optimized any of this so there's only one shitty little link to each AP it's not a fantastic throughput test I'm just using iperf to put you know some data in so I can see what's going on here so the main point of this is to see what's going on in the air rather than try and push as much bandwidth as I can through so anyway I'll show you what I've got here okay what I've got here is half of the six gig um Spectrum it's not from six to seven it's it's half of that and I'll show you why in a sec but you can clearly see where my um mesh link is there well not too clear because it's not the most fantastic of things but it will be when it's done as I said this is extremely rough but but that's it there so I'm just running iperf through that and you can see this I want to stop it you can see that yellow sheet stopped and if I start it again you can see it's back there that's nothing too special there I want to show you the channels that we're talking about here and so hopefully make things a little bit clearer so these are the frequencies for the channels that we've got available now you can see the old uni one two and three down here and that's you know the size of bandwidth it took and here we go with unifor five six seven eight now I just found out um yesterday when I started looking at this because the first time I've touched 60 gig to be honest with you that in Australia we can only use this uni5 we can't use the top half of this so um so restricted to down here you can see that I'll just zoom in a bit on on the lower half here so if you have a look at the channels you can see um you've got your 20 meg ones here bonded to 40 Meg 80 Meg wide and 160. now I'm using 160 and I'll show you the config for that in a second in fact I'll show you now so here's the aps just the two there so if I go to the portal and I go to the radio and show you the channel these are the options so they're the little 20 meg ones where they've got a minus they can be 40 Meg where they've got an e they can be 80 and with s they're 160. so I've got 5S selected and if I go back to here you can see Channel 5 here and because I said s it's going to use this 160 Meg chunk here and my other options for 160 Mig channels is 37s and 69s if I go back here you can see 37 this is second 20 meg channel in and 69 here which makes it which would be all that if I used it so I'm going to run this first on this 160 Meg Channel which I guess is called 15 on here um 47 and 79 so I'll start with this one down here which goes from about no 5.9 inch to 6.1 ish now as I said the way that's getting its information is not by getting samples and doing fft it's doing an RF sweep and it does that with a program called hack RF Suite which is part of the hack RF install but to access that from python I had to use a sub process which was within a thread as well and starting and stopping that and getting data to and from it was that had me stuck for months but I finally got some help from someone um and I gave them a little uh cheap one of these not one of these achie party RTL dongle to sort of get him invested in the project so he's Keen he's helped me out and that's why I can progress a bit further but I'm going to go to Q Spectrum analyzer just to show it because it's clearer because my program isn't uh polished yet but um it will be so I'll use Q Spectrum analyzer and and show you what's going on before I do I'll just show you that this this is sweeping for that this is sweeping the first half so it's sweeping from there to about there and it's doing that at 13 sweeps a second so it's not too shabby okay so anyway I'll show Q Spectrum analyzer now so if we go 5.9 to 6.5 and show you that we can see there is it's a little bit clearer because I can have the max hold on this which I will in my software but haven't got around to it so what you can see oh that's the whole band so well the whole man that's allowed in Australia 5.9 to 6.5 it's nice and quick and you can clearly see it there what I'm going to do is I'm just going to zoom in on that that low bit there okay so there you can see channel 15 or 5S depending on what you want to call it and this is why I like to look at these things because already I've noticed that there's a bit of a higher amount of energy here which would be the the channel 5 part so it's labeled as 5s on the AP you can see where all the channels are bonded here pretty much to get me the 160 Meg but I'm curious about that it might be some sort of Beacon thing I don't know don't quote me I'm not even I'm just starting to have a look at this six gig stuff I can do packet catches and things later but that's not the point of this video but you can see that it's there so at least I have some visibility now of what's in six gig and you know the hack RF it's it's a bit nasty it's not rated for these frequencies it's only rated up to six gig so now what I'm going to do is I'm just going to show you I'll push the channel up now to 37s and that'll take a minute for the mesh to figure out that I've changed Channel and get all happy again but remember that screen and I'll show you what the next Channel up looks like okay so now I'm on channel 37s which will be like this channel 47 here and you can see that I've still got it going up to six point almost three ish gig okay it's not a huge signal there but you can clearly see that there's there's traffic there you can see the RF which is better than nothing so now I'm going to go up to the next Channel up which is 69s to give you 79. so I will set that again in the mesh portal bang bang radio again six nine yes okay here I am up on channel 69s and same as before you can see the the biggest Spike here on the actual Channel designator as you can see here Channel 69 for this big chunk there but if you have a look at the the bigger 160 Meg bandwidth stuff it's starting to it's starting to get low now so you can see there's still some down here at about 6.27ish gig um but look it's dropping off you can almost see it fade into the um the noise floor there so that that shows that it's not fantastic you can see stuff there but um not really and given that that's the limit of the the allowed band in Australia um if you're in America where they can use the the higher bands I believe um this wouldn't really work so it just gets in there for the limit of Australia we're not allowed to have high frequencies yeah we like so it works but it's not ideal however it's also a 200 piece of Kit and I'll tell you another motive that I've got for making this thing this is a product I saw that I'm sure does other things for Wi-Fi as well as I got in the background but just to get a six gig Spectrum analyzer they're charging 10 grand us and that just doesn't sit well with me really and also you know subscriptions for for survey software I don't like that one bit so I've got this Hardware here that's nice and cheap and um you know for a couple of hundred bucks that's I'll I'll just deal with it all right I'm going to do that all again quickly because I just bumped the antenna and put it in better so here's the load Channel you can see it quite clearly there so that's the low channel um 5S all right here's Channel 37s now so you can see it a bit clearer a lot clearer actually um so there's the channel 37 Spike and there's 160 Meg wide Channel but you can see that it is dropping off towards the high end still so you can see it's getting lower as the frequency gets higher so now I'll do the um the top one 69s okay that's a bit better that's Channel 69s again you can see the the Channel 69 part there um you can still see the signal but it's dropping off it's dropping right down um just to be clearer than what I showed before so you can use it if you're in Australia and we only have half of the available six gig band to use you can use a hack RF to um to see it and as I said they only costs a couple hundred bucks and the software you can do what you want with so I'll go back to my 3D one back on the uh the lower Channel okay and here's my dodgy one so far but I can pause this and zoom right in and do stuff and when it's done I'm going to have things like markers where I can measure I'll take measurements of the spectrum like you would on a real Spectrum analyzer um but for now it's a bit rough but it's still there so I just wanted to show what I've been up to and prove that you know a cheap bit of Hardware can actually look at this RF stuff it's not going to be just Wi-Fi but I'll start with Wi-Fi tools because I've got all these transmitters and stuff here so it's easy to do but it'll still be for other radio stuff and I won't neglect the RTL donglever they've just got different purposes in the way they run so I'm working on that but I'm not going to release anything until it works this is this is horrible it's not worth doing anything so I want to try and make sure there's no bugs before I go releasing code um and I want to thank GN for helping me out with the python stuff because I would have been stuck I was stuck for months until I got that help so thanks thanks mate and the rest of you I'm sure want this when it's done but it's not done yet but when it will be it'll have a GUI and it'll be nice and hopefully it'll work and I'll get that out one of these days so anyway that's what I've been doing and that's what I'm working on and uh that's about that so pack our F couple hundred bucks make sure the antenna's on there that's just a Aruba antenna with the SMA to reverse polarity SMA adapter in there so I could actually put a computer antenna on a standard bit of kit anyway that's all for now until next time take it easy

Channel: Tall Paul Tech

Views: 9,206

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Id: c0aykj3fn-s

Length: 17min 5sec (1025 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 14 2022