A few weeks ago, by chance, I stumbled across Michael Ossman's blog entry titled Giving away HackRF, which promised a free beta version of some radio hardware to the first respondents. Apparently I acted just in time, because HackRF "jawbreaker" number 485 (out of 500!) just arrived here in Hannover.

This thing is curiously without much documentation, but the general idea is this: instead of implementing a radio device in analog hardware (with mixers and resonant circuits and phase-locked-loops and all that), one can instead just use a sufficiently fast digitizer and then implement all the radio demodulation in software. It's called "software defined radio".

It's very exciting to me that this stuff has plummeted in cost and advanced in performance from being simply a crazy idea about a decade ago into something that arrives for free (expected retail price ~$300) in my mailbox.

Some ideas for what to do with it:
1. Start simple with AM and FM radio receivers
2. Radio astronomy - track the crab pulsar
3. Holy grail: software defined GPS (not sure if possible)

The board is curiously without documentation. For starters we can just look at what chips are on it:

MAX 2837 - 2.3GHz to 2.7GHz Wireless Broadband RF Transceiver
MAX 5864 - Ultra-Low-Power, High-Dynamic-Performance, 22Msps Analog Front End
Xilinx XC2C64A - Complex programmable logic device (like an FPGA?)
NXP LPC4330FBD144 - "Dual-core Cortex-M4/M0 (ARM CPU), 264 kB SRAM, 2 HS USB with on-chip PHY, Ethernet, CAN, AES, SPIFI, SGPIO, SCT"

Wow, integrated electronics are amazing!

The board is populated with just two connectors: one SMA connector for an antenna (RF IN), and one micro USB connector. Then there are very many unstuffed headers.

Many thanks to Michael Ossman for providing this exciting piece of hardware. I'll try to make good on the beta program by doing something fun with it!

link: https://github.com/mossmann/hackrf

Saturday afternoon project from a few weeks ago; thanks to Adafruit for the kit.

location: secret underground electronics laboratory
status: soldering