HackRF 103 : Looking Glass and Audio Apps - Full Tutorial

what is going on you guys it is the talking sasquat and it's great to have you back now I've been working on an intro series on the hack RF with Porta pack and it's gotten some really great feedback this radio frequency stuff is not super simple so it's kind of a large barrier of entry for a lot of people including myself now if you watched the second video in the series I went over a bunch of the apps in the receiving folder now there were a ton of apps in there so I didn't really get a good chance to explain things completely and I actually skipped over a few apps and two of the apps that I kind of skipped over over were actually two of the most important apps on the hack all rack those two apps are spy glass and audio now with those two apps alone you can do a whole bunch of really cool stuff the challenge is there's so many little settings and so many things to change it's hard to figure out exactly how they work on your own so I went through I got some help from guys like snoring looked up the Wikipedia I went through everything and tried to make every single part of these apps as easy and simple as possible so if you just got yourself a hack RF and you're struggling to start off well this is the video for you let's [Music] go so when I first started the series on the hack RF I was completely honest with you I said I don't know how to use this the first two videos that I made about the hack RF was basically me figuring out what everything did and kind of just relaying that on to you guys and today's no different I literally spent hours and hours working on figuring out exactly how Looking Glass worked how it worked with audio what all the little settings did how to really refine my searches and figure out how everything works and honestly Looking Glass is probably one of the first apps you really want to start messing with cuz it gives you a great introduction to the hack RF and radio frequency in general so let's pop on down to the hack RF Cam and take a look going to go ahead and Power It Up press this knob one time and then we have hack RF right now I'm running the Mayhem 2.0 release firmware which is the latest release press one time on the middle button to get to the menu so as we said before we're going to be taking a look at the looking glass app you can use either the buttons here or the dial to move around but uh the middle button here is going to open up looking glass right now I am just looking at some FM broadcasts uh and I can go through and show you what some of the stuff does but first a message for today's sponsor code Crafters code Crafters is a fantastic learning platform you can learn anything from C++ JavaScript rust they've got all sorts of great stuff to learn they' used even got a six-stage challenge that you can learn how to use Docker so hey I'll finally learn exactly how Docker Works Cod Crafters makes it easier than ever to learn all sorts of great stuff definitely check them out down below for 40% off of your first order just follow the link Down Below in the descriptions to start learning today thanks so much to code crafters for the sponsorship let's get back at it now first things first let's go up over to here we have the LNA and VGA and we have our amplifier as I explained in the last video LNA is the low noise amplifier VGA is the variable gain amplifier and amplifier is just the hardware amplifier that's actually right inside the hack RF now for today I'm actually not going to be using the onboard amplifier we'll leave that turned off and then you can use the low noise amplifier and the variable gain amplifier to try to make our signals look as good as possible so you'll see here I'm going to turn the VGA down and you'll notice immediately what happens on the screen what we're trying to do is actually increase the low noise amplifier to get the best signal we can which is 40 which is the the highest it'll go and then we can use the variable gain amplifier to kind of keep looking at things you'll notice as we increase this you'll get more and more noise so it doesn't necessarily make things better what we're trying to find are those stripes that we were seeing in the beginning right now we have too much noise so we can't really see anything so if we drop this back down to about 42 or so now you see we got the nice Stripes so we kind of know where our frequencies are so a quick lay of the land right here so if we go over here we'll see we have a minimum and a maximum that's the frequency range that we're currently looking at and you'll notice down here range says 21 that basically means we're looking at a 21 mahz range that's between the minimum and the maximum you can change the minimum and maximum to pretty much whatever you want keeping in mind the larger the range is the slower this is going to go because the more data you're going to be looking at now you'll see down here that we have presets the presets are really cool right now I've just got it on FM broadcast but if I use a little jog wheel it'll go to Aviation different Aviation frequency ranges ham radio we got all sorts of stuff more ham radio more ham radio there's a lot of ham radio those guys love radios uh more and more ham ham tastic snoring uh let's see water meters which we talked about before but you can see them right on the waterfall and this is what's called a waterfall as it falls down it just you looks like a waterfall it's kind of cool what else is in here ISM uh we have Bluetooth and Wi-Fi which actually I'm using the Bluetooth Wi-Fi V antenna I use that antenna basically because it's non-conductive and I feel like I have less of a chance of blowing up my amplifier because that sounds scary uh moving on what else do we have we have Wi-Fi 5G all let's see there's our MF band we've got high frequency band we've got our uh VHF bands more VH or UHF bands sorry it's hard to read I'm reading off the monitor cuz I can't see the green at all sorry guys yeah super high frequency full range so this is the entire frequency range you'll notice the range up there says what is that 7138 or something like that that's a big range so you see how slowly this whole thing moves so for now what we'll do I'm just going to set it to oh here's USA pagers there's a lot of lot of cool stuff but again this is why you want to use this as one of the first apps you can play around with so we can see we actually got a frequency right here which is kind of cool let me show you what a few other of these things do so step right here is slightly confusing it changes basically the number of steps that you're going to take when you're changing your minimums and maximums right now it's set at one so it'll change by one if I go to step and change that to 25 it's going to change that by 25 so when you're moving things around you're going to see this come up again and again because you're going to need to go from really big steps to really small steps to really get to the right areas and then so we get back to where we were let's go back to the USA Pages this was uh which one we're at here we go four five4 so that's what steps do now we also have resolution so the resolution is basically just going to increase the resolution which you'll see what it does as I increase it it's going to slow it down but it's going to give us more and more information now that may not necessarily help you at all but it gives you a little bit more data a little bit more information on the screen which is pretty cool all right so for the sake of this let me switch this back my resolution back down here so things go quick and then I'm going to go to uh let's go to some other stuff radio sis so yeah actually this will work just fine because we'll notice that we do have a bunch of nice little lines that we can kind of play with and try to get a better look at so first things first basically all we're trying to do with Looking Glass is figure out exactly where frequencies are that we want to look at so one of the things we can do is a filter so the filter when we turn this on it's going to actually show there we go it kind of filters all out a lot of the Riff Raff data so right now we're on high filter and we can see we've got these three nice bars there so we can use the resolution down here and actually wh I always keep pressing too many times we can use resolution what that's going to do it's going to show more data on the screen and because we're filtering stuff out we actually get a really strong red line which is really good from there what we can also do is change this F basically f means fast scan or if we moove it slow scan the slow scan is actually going to give you even more information notice we have more lines showing up now because we're slowing down the way we're reading so that works really well so now you can see I've got a lot more stuff I can look at which is again awesome so that's one way of looking at the data in the waterfall one of the other things you can do is actually change over here it says Spectrum we can change that over to level and Peak very cool on both of those now the level app does two things that are kind of neat so first of all you just have basically it'll show you where the highest peak levels are and you can actually change the speed of update with the multiplier right here nine will take it kind of slow zero makes it really fast which is kind of fun I like to leave it kind of higher because I think it's a lot easier to understand also if we go to Peaks basically Peaks is just going to keep growing and growing every time there's a higher Peak it's going to record that as where that line is is and it's just going to keep doing that over and over again until you hit reset and then it's going to reset all the Peaks one of the other really cool things is right here it says Max hold so what Max hold does is actually finds the most powerful frequency in this range and selects it now there are two ways of basically going from Looking Glass into the audio app the first way would be to use the jump command from either Peaks or levels and that'll take you directly into the audio app at the most powerful broadcast frequency in the range you're looking at if we go back into Looking Glass we can also go through and if we go to I keep forgetting where that is there we go into the marker we can move this little arrow on top and if we do that we can just pick basically where we want to be press this middle button and that's going to drag us directly into audio as well now that we're in audio we're going to see a pretty similar waterfall and we're in the Spectrum view real quick thing to note because this confused the heck out of me when you are in Spectrum there will be no audio output the rest of the different views actually do have audio output from either a speaker on board or there is a mini jack right there we'll also notice that over here we have the LNA the VGA and we have the amplifier down here just like we do on everything else now in the Spectrum view you'll notice down here we have two things that we can change one of which is the bandwidth so when we change the bandwidth we'll notice that not only does this change kind of the resolution or the you know the bandwidth it's using but also changes the speed because the more bandwidth the slower it goes but you can see as we go along here it kind of Zooms in on our signal for us which is really cool to see the other thing that we have is speed so speed effectively changes how much information is stored for packet so the lower this turns the faster this whole thing goes what's nice about that is if we want to increase our bandwidth to see you know a lot more information we can decrease the speed which basically is going to decrease the amount of information gathered per frame and we can actually have the waterfall moving again which is pretty sweet a lot of what you're going to find yourself doing on the hack RF is you know trying to find things and then trying to hone in on them so you can actually listen to them or process them in a way that's actually useful so that's basically the Spectrum view but if you notice over here we can actually change this using the dial so now we have our am we have our narrow band FM we have our wideband FM and then back to the Spectrum so let's start by looking at am so right now we're just looking at am frequencies and this is on the double sideband 9k modulation which is what most AM radio stations are transmitted on at least here in the States now what double side band means is that you'll notice in the middle there's a line in the in the center vertical line then a horizontal Green Line well that vertical line actually means the carrier signal and you'll notice that green line means that it's actually transmitting above and below that frequency again this is basically how we use AM radio frequencies here in the states if we go over one we'll notice that it goes over to dual sideband 6K which is just a little bit narrower band so it can cut out some noise if you have an ugly signal if we go on from there we'll get to the USB which is upper side band remember what I said before about that green line now it's only in front of the carrier this is mostly what people are using when they're transmitting in high frequency if we move up from there basically now we're on LSP which is the Lower Side Band which is just the opposite of upper side band again you can see the little green line right there now is below our signal pretty much it's the rule of thumb that if you're transmitting under 10 MHz you're going to use the Lower Side Band and if you're going to be transmitting over 10 MHz you're going to use upper side band at least according to Wikipedia all right so let's check some other stuff out let's go back up to am and now we're going to go to that's Spectrum now we're going to to nfm or narrow band FM these are things like walkie-talkies old unsecured or unencrypted cordless phones baby monitors stuff like that if we press down we'll notice that we have some more settings again so bandwidth is just like it always is it's going to basically increase or decrease the bandwidth so the amount of data that we're listening to at a time for something like you know trying to hear walkie-talkies ideally once you find the signal you're going to want that to be as narrow as possible uh in order to get the the best signal possible now we'll also notice this thing which is called squelch so what squelch is is basically because you're on a walkie-talkie you don't necessarily want to hear all the static in between Transmissions so what squelch does is basically it mutes it when it doesn't hear actual you know noise or actual data coming through so if there's just radio dark like it is right now it'll filter all that out so you just hear silence now the guys over on the Mayhem Wiki recommend using 40 to 50 or so but again try it yourself that's what's great about this uh device is you can just try stuff and see how it works and that brings us to our last setting on here which is going to be why do I always go backwards I don't know is going to be wfm which is wideband FM and this is effectively normal FM radio that we listened to before we had Spotify now I highly recommend if you're going to mess around with any of these honestly get yourself a pair of headphones or a speaker or something like that because in researching for this I spent probably an hour of time wasting just moving around the radio spectrum listening to stuff seeing what I could find it's a lot of fun so as before we still have adjustable bandwidth so we have a few of them 200k is the original filter for stations broadcasting on FM that's what you're going to use most of the time if we move over to 180k it's a slightly narrower bandwidth and again it can actually help increase the quality of a por signal just as before if we go all the way down to 40K this is actually something you can use to receive images from Noah satellites that orbit over the top of us all the time there was actually one pretty close when I was recording this entire video so it was cool you can kind of see it it'll show up it'll transmit stuff obviously you can't see a picture right on this but with you know some software you can actually decode those images so that's a pretty good overview of how the Looking Glass and audio apps work you can see how powerful these things are and once you kind of understand what the different things do and how to adjust things how to change resolutions and speeds in order to get the best view of what's going on you can really find some cool stuff so if you have a hack RF spend some time spend some hours between Looking Glass and the audio app you will not be disappointed it's so fun to play with so yeah that's a great intro on how to use Looking Glass and Audio Apps originally I was trying to sneak Recon into this video as well but it kind of works really well going between Looking Glass and audio I felt like trying to shoot horn Recon into this video didn't really make sense also honestly I'm doing videos on the hack RF because I think it's a really cool device and doing Looking Glass as its own video with audio as kind of the next step to it uh makes the most sense makes it easier for people to find now of course I'll be making videos in the future on all the rest of the cool apps that are on the hack RF and all the ones that will be coming up on the hack RF but for now I hope this helped you out I hope you learned something I hope this made you know maybe somebody wants to go out and buy a hack RF cuz now it looks like something they might be able to handle let me tell you if I can do it so can you so thank you so much for watching we'll catch you next time he

Channel: Talking Sasquach

Views: 12,989

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Id: 6hbb8Zy06x0

Length: 16min 46sec (1006 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 31 2024