Secret Radio Stations By The Numbers

October 29, 2015 by Al Williams 124 Comments

One thing has stayed with the James Bond movie franchise through the decades: Mr. Bond always has the most wonderful of gadgets. Be it handheld, car-based, or otherwise, there’s always something to thrill that is mostly believable.

The biggest problem with all of those gadgets is that they mark Commander Bond as an obvious spy. “So Mr. Bond, I see you have a book with many random five character groups. Nothing suspicious about that at all!” And we all know that import/export specialists often carry exploding cufflinks or briefcases full of unknown electronics in hidden compartments.

Just as steganography hides data in plain sight, the best spy gadgets are the ones that don’t seem to be a spy gadget. It is no wonder some old weapons are little more than sticks or farm implements. You can tell a peasant he can’t have a sword, but it is hard to ban sticks.

Imagine you were a cold war era spy living in a hostile country with a cover job with Universal Exports. Would you rather get caught with a sophisticated encryption machine or an ordinary consumer radio? I’m guessing you went with the radio. You aren’t the only one. That was one of the presumed purposes to the mysterious shortwave broadcasts known as number stations. These were very common during the cold war, but there are still a few of them operating.
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Tiny Radio Tracks Your Balloons

October 28, 2015 by Bryan Cockfield 38 Comments

The name of the game in rocketry or ballooning is weight. The amount of mass that can be removed from one of these high-altitude devices directly impacts how high and how far it can go. Even NASA, which estimates about $10,000 per pound for low-earth orbit, has huge incentives to make lightweight components. And, while the Santa Barbara Hackerspace won’t be getting quite that much altitude, their APRS-enabled balloon/rocket tracker certainly helps cut down on weight.

Tracksoar is a 2″ x .75″ x .5″ board which weighs in at 45 grams with a pair of AA batteries and boasts an ATmega 328P microcontroller with plenty of processing power for its array of on-board sensors. Not to mention everything else you would need like digital I/O, a GPS module, and, of course, the APRS radio which allows it to send data over amateur radio frequencies. The key to all of this is that the APRS module is integrated with the board itself, which saves weight over the conventional method of having a separate APRS module in addition to the microcontroller and sensors.

As far as we can see, this is one of the smallest APRS modules we’ve ever seen. It could certainly be useful for anyone trying to save weight in any high-altitude project. There are a few other APRS projects out there as well but remember: an amateur radio license will almost certainly be required to use any of these.

An Improvised Synthetic Aperture Radar

October 25, 2015 by Brandon Dunson 14 Comments

[Henrik] is at it again. Another thoroughly detailed radar project has shown up on his blog. This time [Henrik] is making some significant improvements to his previous homemade radar with the addition of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) to his previous Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW) system.

[Henrik’s] new design uses an NXP LPC4320 which uniquely combines an ARM Cortex-M4 MCU along with a Cortex-M0 co-processor. The HackRF also uses this micro as it has some specific features that can be taken advantage of here like the Serial GPIO (SGPIO) which can be tediously configured and high-speed USB all for ~$8 in single quantity. The mixed signal design is done in two boards, a 4 layer RF board and 2 layer digital board.

Like the gentleman he is, [Henrik] has included schematics, board files, and his modified source from the HackRF project in his github repo. There is simply too much information in his post to attempt to summarize here, if you need instant gratification check out the pictures after the break.

The write-up on his personal blog is impressive and worth look if you didn’t catch our coverage of his single board Linux computer, or his previous radar design.

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Why Should You Get A Ham Radio License?

October 23, 2015 by Al Williams 92 Comments

Several of the authors you read on Hackaday are ham radio operators and we’ve often kicked around having a Hacker Chat about “Why be a ham today?” After all, you can talk to anyone in the world over the Internet or via phone, right? What’s the draw?

The Radio Society of Great Britain had the same thought, apparently, and produced a great video to answer the question. They mention the usual things: learning about technology, learning about people in other parts of the world, disaster communications, and radiosport (which seems to be more popular outside the United States; people compete to find hidden transmitters).

In addition, they talked a lot about how hams get involved with space communications, ranging from talking via satellites, to talking to people on the space station, to actually building small satellites. As the narrator says, there are “hundreds of ways to have techie fun” with ham radio.

One thing we noticed they showed but didn’t say a lot about, though, is the educational opportunities. You can learn a lot, and working with kids to help them learn is often very rewarding (and you usually learn something, too). Just to forestall the comments that this post isn’t hack related, we’ll note two things: there is a Raspberry Pi shown and just past the two-minute mark, there is a very clever hacked together Morse code key.

We talk a lot about ham radio, ranging from Arduino-based digital modes to putting together portable stations (you can see a similar one in the video, too). One other thing we noticed they don’t mention: it is generally much easier to get a license today than ever before. Most countries (including the United States) have abolished the Morse code requirements, so while some hams still enjoy CW (hamspeak for operating Morse code), it isn’t a requirement.

Video below.

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RC Glider Flies By Twisting Its Wings

October 20, 2015 by James Hobson 28 Comments

Remote control gliders typically fly like their full-size counterparts. Tail and wing rudders control the direction of flight — but what if the wings themselves could twist and change their profile, similar to that of a bird? Well, RC glider manufacturer [Jaro Müller] did just that — and it is pretty cool (You’ll need a translation to read it though).

Called the Mini Ellipse, the RC glider is designed to be able to fly in slow thermals and maneuver even better than previous models. The entire wing profile can be controlled by wing flexion — the wing itself is very flexible. Unfortunately we don’t have any info about how it actually goes about doing that, but it’s probably either servo motors pulling wires, or maybe nitinol memory wire… but we’re just guessing. Regardless — take a look at the following video and let us know what you think!

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TEMPEST: A Tin Foil Hat For Your Electronics And Their Secrets

October 19, 2015 by Elliot Williams 38 Comments

Electronics leak waves and if you know what you’re doing you can steal people’s data using this phenomenon. How thick is your tinfoil hat? And you sure it’s thick enough? Well, it turns out that there’s a (secret) government standard for all of this: TEMPEST. Yes, all-caps. No, it’s not an acronym. It’s a secret codename, and codenames are more fun WHEN SHOUTED OUT LOUD!

The TEMPEST idea in a nutshell is that electronic devices leak electromagnetic waves when they do things like switch bits from ones to zeros or move electron beams around to make images on CRT screens. If an adversary can remotely listen in to these unintentional broadcasts, they can potentially figure out what’s going on inside your computer. Read on and find out about the history of TEMPEST, modern research, and finally how you can try it out yourself at home!

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How To Control Siri Through Headphone Wires

October 19, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 7 Comments

Last week saw the revelation that you can control Siri and Google Now from a distance, using high power transmitters and software defined radios. Is this a risk? No, it’s security theatre, the fine art of performing an impractical technical achievement while disclosing these technical vulnerabilities to the media to pad a CV. Like most security vulnerabilities it is very, very cool and enough details have surfaced that this build can be replicated.

The original research paper, published by researchers [Chaouki Kasmi] and [Jose Lopes Esteves] attacks the latest and greatest thing to come to smartphones, voice commands. iPhones and Androids and Windows Phones come with Siri and Google Now and Cortana, and all of these voice services can place phone calls, post something to social media, or launch an application. The trick to this hack is sending audio to the microphone without being heard.

The ubiquitous Apple earbuds have a single wire for a microphone input, and this is the attack vector used by the researchers. With a 50 Watt VHF power amplifier (available for under $100, if you know where to look), a software defined radio with Tx capability ($300), and a highly directional antenna (free clothes hangers with your dry cleaning), a specially crafted radio message can be transmitted to the headphone wire, picked up through the audio in of the phone, and understood by Siri, Cortana, or Google Now.

There is of course a difference between a security vulnerability and a practical and safe security vulnerability. Yes, for under $400 and the right know-how, anyone could perform this technological feat on any cell phone. This feat comes at the cost of discovery; because of the way the earbud cable is arranged, the most efficient frequency varies between 80 and 108 MHz. This means a successful attack would sweep through the band at various frequencies; not exactly precision work. The power required for this attack is also intense – about 25-30 V/m, about the limit for human safety. But in the world of security theatre, someone with a backpack, carrying around a long Yagi antenna, pointing it at people, and having FM radios cut out is expected.

Of course, the countermeasures to this attack are simple: don’t use Siri or Google Now. Leaving Siri enabled on a lock screen is a security risk, and most Androids disable Google Now on the lock screen by default. Of course, any decent set of headphones would have shielding in the cable, making inducing a current in the microphone wire even harder. The researchers are at the limits of what is acceptable for human safety with the stock Apple earbuds. Anything more would be seriously, seriously dumb.