RF Transmission In The 9 KHz Band

April 25, 2010 by Mike Szczys 31 Comments

[W1VLF] is on a quest to communicate over long distances with a 9 kilohertz transmitter. He built this giant coil with that in mind. A round concrete form was used as a base and wound with magnet wire by hand. We’d recommend building an automated winding device, but this method seems to have worked. Operating at 50 Watts on the air-core coil at 8.97 KHz he was able to pick up the signal at a distance of 5 kilometers. It’s not breaking any overall distance or portability records, but on a project like this the quest is where the fun is at.

[Thanks Drone]

WiFi And Bluetooth Sniffing Rifle

April 23, 2010 by Mike Szczys 52 Comments

[.ronin] built an all-in-one WiFi and Bluetooth sniffer. He used a Nerf rifle as a base and added two Pringles cantennas, a tablet PC, and other various bits to tie it all together. Now he wanders the streets, explaining the device to bewildered passersby. After showing the device at CarolinaCon 2010 (here’s a PDF of his presentation) he stopped by the mall nibbled about 250 Bluetooth devices using SpoofTooph. The software is running on a Fujitsu u810 tablet and he’s making good use of Backtrack 4 during his wireless adventures.

Infrared Transmission Decoding

April 21, 2010 by Mike Szczys 12 Comments

Alright class, quiet down and open your books to the chapter on Manchester Encoding. [Brian J Hoskins] did just that when building this RC5 decoder. This protocol is commonly used in television remote controls. You use them on a daily basis, don’t you think it’s time you understood what’s going on? Check out his writeup and learn the dark art of invisible light communication. Or just skip the learning and follow our how-to.

[Thanks Tim]

All About VLF Radio

April 14, 2010 by Mike Szczys 20 Comments

If you’re interested in learning about Very Low Frequency communications take a look at what Larry has to offer on his site. He’s put together a guide to VLF receivers that is short enough to read and clear enough to understand with rudimentary knowledge of circuits. He builds a simple receiver as a working example and a high-powered transmitter that can put out over 2600 watts. Let’s face it, radio operators were the original electronic hackers. Get back to our roots and learn the ways of the transistor.

[Thanks Buddy]

Building A Window Mounted Antenna For Your Car

April 12, 2010 by Mike Szczys 16 Comments

If you’re into ham radio and want it when you’re on the go give this antenna mount a try. [Cirictech] started with a design from the November 2009 issue of QST and added his own fabrication touches. Everything except the antenna itself is available from the hardware store for just a few bucks, and you should be able to complete this project in a flash. This makes us wonder what the antenna for the 47 GHz band radio setup would look like.

IM-ME Spectrum Analyzer

March 17, 2010 by Mike Szczys 27 Comments

[Michael Ossmann] rolled out some firmware that makes his IM-ME into a Spectrum Analyzer. He met up with [Travis Goodspeed], who authored the IM-ME flashing guide, at SchmooCon and spent some time hacking wireless doo-dads in the hotel bar. Once he arrived home the new firmware was just a few coding sessions away from completion. It scans one frequency at a time, displaying the results in a 132 column graph on the screen. He also added a ribbon cable and header to the debug contacts so that future hacking would be as simple as plugging in the GoodFET.

[Thanks Jared and Travis]

Follow-up: Hacking OnStar

March 16, 2010 by James Munns 22 Comments

Reader [regulatre] has provided us with his furthering of hacking the OnStar system in GM cars. Previously, we wrote about some initial attempts to gain access to the system that OnStar uses to monitor and control cars called GMLAN. [regulatre] has managed to create an adapter between the GMLAN connector and a standard OBD2 plug, which should allow a number of standard readers to be able to retrieve data.

This method details using a bluetooth OBD2 reader, and passing the data onto a linux machine. It looks as though the writer of this method is looking to integrate OnStar reading and writing into an Android App which currently is an OBD monitor.

We love seeing follow-ups like this, because it puts everyone one step closer to full control of closed devices. As always, let us know if you take any of this in a new direction.