HackRF 102 : Receiving Signals Explained! Featuring Mayhem 2.0 & Antenna Tuning Guide!

what's going on you guys it is the talking Sasquatch and it's great to have you back man after the last video I've been getting a ton of feedback people want to learn more and more about the hack all raft now they do a pretty good job over at the wiki as far as explaining how a lot of the stuff works but it's still pretty complicated in a lot of cases even with pretty good documentation it's still very confusing there's a lot of little settings and things that it took me forever to figure out how they work and even still there's a bunch of stuff I have no clue how it works but we're getting there together so for today's video I'm going to go through all of the apps on the receive side of things and pretty much go over exactly what they do and a little bit of information on how to use them so that being said there is a lot to go over so let's get into it let's [Music] go so first up huge shout outs to the developers of the Mayhem firmware they just dropped version 2.0 of the firmware and it's even better than ever one of the biggest updates is actually they move the applications onto the SD card instead of being held internally that means you can have a ton more apps a ton more really really cool idea they now have working USB serial communication while in portter pack mode they also added a ton of Serial commands they have all new settings including brightness and button color which I love they also added ble apps to receive and transmit so guess what you can do your blle spam with your hack RF as well hey man if you can't annoy every in your nearby proximity with some spam what's the point of living all right so let's pop over to the Hands-On camera and let's go through all these apps and I'll tell you exactly what they all do well most of them at least hey here we are and we've got my totally official legal in Canada hack RF stand which is you know working really well right now and you'll notice actually up in the top Corner they've added a brightness feature so I can change the brightness that's actually a really big deal for me cuz this is what it looked like before and now with the brightness turned down it looks way better now you'll also notice once we get into here that hey I've got different color buttons now again it helps a lot for filming plus it matches with my cool little purple pink kind of Decor going on so if you flash the latest firmware all you got to do is go into settings and then all the way down at the bottom here you will have menu color so you can just change it there super cool and then just hold the back button we'll get back to the main screen so as promised what we'll do is going to go up into receive and we're just going to go through all of the apps inside here all right so I guess first things first is going to be adsb which actually means automatic development surveillance broadcast the you need you know what it stands for no all you really need to know is the fact that this is air traffic control so it lets us view airplanes which is really cool now I am going to have to block some of the aircraft that are around me just so I don't dox myself cuz it will have GPS information but yeah you'll see right here those are aircraft flying over my house right now this is also our first introduction to these little adjustments down here for LNA VGA and amplifier amp now these are going to come up over and over and over again in the hack RF so it's really important to know how these things work and kind of how to work with them now one thing to remember about projects like this is that they were made by somebody and they had to go through design and create it and make the pcbs well that brings us to today's sponsor PCB way hey man I've said it once I'll say it again and again and again PCB way is your One-Stop shop for anything when it comes to making amazing projects like the hack RF PCB way has got you covered from beginning to end no matter what you guys need they will personally assist you in the design and printing of pcbs they can help you make 3D enclosures for them absolutely everything you need just to make the coolest stuff possible look I know you've got projects you want to make and they're not always easy to do I've got so many projects I'm halfway into but PCB way has helped make so many things happen for so many creators just like you so head on over to PCB way.com for a free instant quote as always thank you so much to PCB way for all your continued support you guys are absolutely the best let's get back at it so the first thing we have is our LNA LNA is the low noise amplifier which basically is trying to amplify only the signal that we're interested in the VGA is a variable gain amplifier and basically that's going to amplify everything think of it as kind of a fine-tuning adjustment and according to the documentation they recommend sitting between 8 and 16 so we'll select VGA and then we will go all the way down to 16 just turn the dial and we'll get there and 16 as for the LNA recommendation is you know typically 24 to 32 so we'll set it to whoops go down to let's say 32 hey editing Sasquatch here so immediate imately after I finished filming this my buddy snorin who's the hack RF Master definitely go check out his videos if you haven't uh he gave me a really good tuning guide for the antennas so it's a little bit awkward but this is the transition to that part so let's go so here's a little bit of a quick and dirty tuning guide so we'll just go to AIS boats you can do this anywhere but it works well here and then what we're going to do is press this button right here once and then twice that should bring up our radio settings next to the radio settings you're going to notice the radio saturation this this is the important part now we're aiming for a radio saturation of about 80 so if you set things too high and it goes to 100 what's going to happen is you're going to have too much noise you're not going to be able to hear anything so our first setting here is our amplifier the interesting thing is that the amplifier can actually fail on you so if you turn the amplifier off which is the zero setting if the saturation on your radio goes up after turning it off that means your amplifier is broken if the saturation goes up when you turn it on that means your amplifier works now remember we have two settings here this is the LNA which is kind of our our large adjustments we'll call it and then the VGA which is kind of our fine-tuning so ideally you want to get to a saturation of about 80% but you don't want to just crank the second option all the way up to 11 cuz it's going to a it's going to blow out so you see how we're oversaturated but it's not going to be as clear as signal so what we're going to do is we're going to bring this down a bit let's set this down to like 32 and let's see how close to 80 we can get over here so if we go up to 40 which is the top it's as high as we can go we're only at about 56 59 so let's go from 32 on our VGA let's go up 34 71 that's not bad 36 85 100 92 85 86 so let's turn this down let's sit it at 34 cuz I don't want to have too much signal it's sitting right around 77 so that's a really good place to be so now we know that if we use the amplifier setting of one and then the LNA setting of 48 and the VGA setting of 34 it's going to give us a pretty good receive saturation you can just mess around with things see how it works and now back excellent so that's a good starting point and now yeah you'll see right here those are all of the airplanes flying over me and I can actually open those and see all sorts of great information it's got the altitude it's got the Latin longitude I can even open it on a map again I'm going to have to blur it out just so people don't know exactly where I am but it's a really cool feature even Su you can actually go and zoom in and out on the map which again you can't see but it's the super super cool feature here all right so back on the receive menu let's go over to AIS boats AIS stands for automatic identification system and it's basically just what boats use to communicate with each other and with the shore now you'll notice that we have this channel option now there's only going to be two options 87b and 88 B 88b works at a 161.5 75 MHz channel so basically it's just a Simplex way for ships to talk to each other Simplex is known as talk around it basically means that sending and receiving are on the same frequency so that means that nobody can talk over each other just like a walkie-talkie that's why we you know when you hear people talking on walkie-talkies they always say over at the end that's basically them saying that they're done speaking and the other person can start because again there only one channel Brian pick up over what Brian please say over when you finish talking over what over do you see the wire yet over no no what over no over and then we have 88b 88b runs at 162.5 MHz and is actually a ship to shore duplex Channel what duplex means is that basically the radio station transmit on one frequency and receives on another so full duplex just means that a radio station can transmit and receive simultaneously now I am not particularly close to the shore I also don't have a particularly well suited antenna installed and it's just not going to have the range so obviously this comes up with absolutely nothing but if I was closer to where a bunch of ships and stuff were uh that's where they'd show up all right moving right along let's go over to back and we're going to go aprs now aprs stands for automatic packet Reporting System it's used by organizations like FEMA to send messages now these messages could be like GPS coordinates uh weather station Telemetry text messages announcements position speed all sorts of great stuff now you'll notice you can actually change right here na Europe so basically you're changing the region that you're in cuz they all are going to be transmitting on different frequencies here in America I'm at 14439 again we've also got our amplifier which is going to be Zer or one we're going to leave it at zero for our stuff today and our LNA and VGA again just like we saw in our last settings right over here is actually volume you can change the volume of it cuz if you plug in a headphone down here you can actually hear when the pings come in cool cool cool let's go back to the receipt screen and keep moving moving right along we have audio audio is actually really cool this is just a radio so we can select between am uh near FM wide FM and this is the Spectrum analyzer now the audio app actually honestly deserves its own video so I won't get too crazy into it but just feel free to play around with it it's really cool if you plug in your headphones right here you can hear audio transmissions and stuff like that so just mess around with it and yeah I'll make a whole video just on audio all right so the next one we have is the BL RX which is BL receive now BL RX is going to receive basically advertisement packages the same ones that we can send with our flipper zero you can already see some of the devices that are just in my house going along but if we run say the lockup crash we can see what happens two very boring minutes later yeah you can see all of the B spam that's coming in right now that's super cool it's great to actually see this thing working on another device all right let's stop harassing my neighbors and let's move on all right so next one is ERT meter ERT meter is basically it means encoder receiver transmitter and it created as basically a way of reading water and gas meters so somebody could drive by and just read the meters without having to do anything so you can actually see I can read a few of them so that's pretty fun I don't know what that means but hey I'm reading stuff all right let's go back and keep moving next up is going to be Whoop I'm going the wrong way now is level now level is basically just going to show you some level meters you can see down down here for any given frequency so as you move around it's going to you know change different frequencies and you'll see things graphically down here uh there's not a whole lot to do with this right now at least not that I can show off or I can think to show off but I know there's a ton of usefulness for this but we'll have to get into that in a later video now let's get into a fun one which is pox sag so pox sag actually means post office code standardization Advisory Group basically it was created by the British post office back in the'80s to control Communications in Britain all you need to know is that this is how pagers work so you know the old school beepers pagers and stuff that people carry around that used pox sag transmission now pox sag is actually still used a lot by the government it's used by there's commercial paging operations and there's a bunch of different bands basically in the United States FCC says that the poag is going to work in like 26.99 5 27.45 27.0 N5 27.145 27.1 950 that's hard to say now commercial paging operates on slightly different bands basically in the 35 to 36 43 to 44 152 to 159 bands and then also the 454 to 460 MHz bands referred to as the lower band long story short go out and research pox sag bands for your location and you know try some stuff out see if you find anything I haven't found anything yet but I'm not entirely sure what band is being used in my area so let's go back keep moving next up is Radio sunde I think think that's how it's pronounced but radio snde is a small battery powered instrument that measures atmospheric conditions and transmits the data down to a ground server basically they're carried by a weather balloon they're weather balloons that's what these are it uses a 402 to 43 MHz range so tool around in those frequencies and see if you find anything I think it'd be really cool to find something but the chances of a weather balloon floating near I really don't know what the odds are but I haven't found one yet let's move on okay now we have Recon Recon is another heavy Duty app that I definitely don't have the time in this video to explain basically it's a rework of the scanner app offering different possibilities and customizations so honestly this app's going to have to wait for a later video cuz there's so much stuff in here I don't even know a quarter of it and it would be a disservice to you for me to even try to fake it so let's just move around this one for the moment and we'll keep going so this next app works kind of like the flipper zero sub gz frequency scanner so basically it's going to look for a frequency like what we're going to send right here so open the app and before I get background noise I'll send it and then we'll see right here boom that's the signal that I just got anytime I send it you'll see that right there it'll go up so if I send it again right there you can see that that increases so that's exactly the frequency that I'm sending with my flipper very very cool now you'll see you have a minimum and maximum frequency I've got this in a pretty narrow band uh just to make sure I don't pick up too much outside noise there's a ton of noise especially in the 433 band I got it to work and you can see exactly how that is just again just mess around with everything obviously you see you have your LNA and your VGA you're going to have that on most of the things here and then you can just change pretty much everything again I'm not trying to get into any minutia with any of these apps but just kind of tell you what they do and a brief idea of how to use them next one here is TPMS cars TPMS stands for tire pressure management system and yeah if you have a car that has tire pressure sensors that's what uses them so I've sat around during rush hour I've got a road that drives you know goes past my house like most people and I have picked up some tire pressures pretty cool you can yell at somebody that they have low tire pressure uh not a ton of usefulness but again it's cool I like it it's fun to play with moving right along we have weather so weather basically is going to pick up weather you know Wireless weather stations in your area there are either ones that some people have you know may have in their house or there are frequencies that individual countries tend to use like in the United States it's about 315 right there which is what I'm run running I haven't found anything yet but again I don't have a super powerful antenna and I don't think I'm very close to any weather stations I know this works especially go outside most of the problems that people have with receiving stuff the answer is go outside or put your antenna outside which is a little bit easier for some people all right moving on we have sub gigahertz D which basically is the similar thing to the search thing but this is just for sub gigahertz and then we can set it to the same frequency and you can see if I send on this boom boom boom those are all of the bits that are sent those are the individual bits it's really cool I'm not really sure how to translate this to anything yet but that's what this one does it does the trick let's hit clear just for fun and we'll go back now here's a familiar guy right here NRF NRF just stands for Nordic RF which is the company that makes the chipset on there and it's a proprietary low power lowcost transceiver at the 2.4 GHz range created by Nordic semiconductor mainly used for remotes keyboards mice things like that you'll notice I have a ton of stuff running on this right now it shows up all over the place now there an add-on for flipper zero that you've seen me use before mainly used for things like Mouse jacking you can see how much stuff is actually on here there's a ton of stuff running right now on that 2.4 GHz range okay so the afsk according to the documentation is an application that's broken this is what it does it spits out gibberish the gibberish apparently means nothing this is all it does run the latest nightly builds and sooner or later we'll have this thing fixed last but not least is analog TV this is super cool however it doesn't work pretty much anywhere it's basically acting exactly like an analog TV antenna so what it's doing is it's you know going through the airwaves and it's looking for an analog TV signal now unfortunately in America there are no official analog TV everything is digital now so you can't pick anything up a little bit of a bummer but sometime in the future I'll try to find a hacky way of showing out how this works if I have another hack RF I can actually transmit analog TV signal and then I can receive it I'm not sure if that's some sort of SCC violation I'll have to look it up before doing it publicly but you know really really cool so that's a Roundup of all of the receive functions and kind of how they work and what they do man remember I told you this was going to be a lot and there's so much great stuff to learn when it comes to hack RF remember I'm learning right beside you I mean I went through and wrote this entire script up yeah I wrote a script well an outline and had to learn all this stuff and while the documentation is good there's definitely a bunch of gaps in it thanks again so much to snoring for giving me basically the once up as far as LNA and VGA goes and figuring out whether or not the amp worked all right so now what I need from you guys is to tell me what apps do you want me to cover first obviously the radio and scan apps are going to get their own videos themselves or at least maybe I'll put them into one video but what else are you guys interested in what else do you want to see me use and then obviously I'll be going over all the other features that hack RF has uh not just the receiving functions thank you guys so much for watching please make sure like comment subscribe tell your friends haar ref seems be getting more and more popular and hopefully with videos like these everybody will learn how to use them a little easier you guys are the best we'll catch you [Music] later he

Channel: Talking Sasquach

Views: 15,463

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Id: edNYFuHucfw

Length: 18min 31sec (1111 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 03 2024