from Hacker News

RF Spectrum Mapping

by seamac3 on 6/30/23, 3:16 AM with 18 comments

  • by imglorp on 6/30/23, 8:09 AM

    This is some real Enemy of the State scifi capability here. Anywhere they have birds overhead, you are a realtime moving dot on the map even if you have no cell coverage, with history.

    And because it's a private company, they don't need a warrant to do this AND they can sell it to whoever does need a warrant.

  • by superkuh on 6/30/23, 4:16 AM

    Or buy a hackrf one and make a wideband antenna like a a bicone or dual planar disk or tapered slot, etc, and use Qspectrumanalyzer with the hackrf_sweep backend to frequency hop at 8 GHz/s (@20 MS/s) for spectrum monitoring.

    edit: Now that someone provided an archive.org mirror I see the site is actually about truly global radio monitoring as a service. That's pretty cool. There's plenty of public/open SDRs online and some that do hyperbolic multi-lateration of signals but nothing so integrated or comprehensive. The USA's Unified Data Library has a lot of this kind of thing too. Unfortunately for regular US citizen accounts you can't use the RF monitoring endpoints in the API or web interface.

  • by ampgt on 6/30/23, 6:34 AM

    “RF Mapping” or open sourced SIGINT? So many issues here. The IC at least has to abide by the constitution (fourth admenment, hello?). What does HE360 have to abide by? Entire company is full of ex-IC contractors and government employees. So.. they’ve essentially taken government tech and now trying to resell it to them? Surprised there isn’t more outrage. These guys will get hacked and a country with no SIGINT program will suddenly have access to an entire constellation. Nice.

  • by lm741 on 6/30/23, 4:16 AM

  • by hereforphone on 6/30/23, 12:49 PM

    https://www.gammarf.io is (was?) a ground based version of this for local areas. Bought out by https://www.sensorscape.io but afaik nothing has been done with it

  • by lebuffon on 6/30/23, 2:08 PM

    https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/interception-and-divulg...

    Does this law apply in the USA or is it moot because it's not about content?

  • by ge96 on 6/30/23, 9:22 AM

    I wish I had a better macro mindset (to make money) for example you have access to satellite imagery, can do (what) analysis, what makes it valuable for people to buy the insight.