This is the last day of technical conference talks so its packed to the gills with content. There is also a closing talk with Ben Hilburn and Derek Kozel where they close out the conference with a bunch of information. Along with a reveal that all or almost all of the workshops have been recorded so I am looking forward to seeing those as well.
Schedule
Full Conference Schedule 9/14 – 9/18
Full Live Video Day 4
Cool Talks Day 4
Software defined radio based Synthetic Aperture noise and OFDM (WiFi) RADAR mapping – Jean-Michel Friedt
You have to get creative when you are a researcher in lockdown, Here they try to see if they could determine how far a house was from their balcony. They created a SDR based Radar and compared its results against the geographic data. They used a PlutoSDR and Ettus B210 along with some various antennas and RF components. He goes through Radar basics and how to implement it in GnuRadio companion. Not happy with just range measurement he then uses a SAR technique to gain azimuth measurements as well which end up producing some amazing images.
FPGA Partial Reconfiguration in SDR Devices – Anthony Convers
FPGA Partial reconfiguration is one of those really cool solutions that are looking for problems to solve, which means it tends to fall into very nice applications where it becomes your only option to enable the functionality you want in a resource constrained hardware. That being said I think FPGA PR fits very nicely in the format this project laid out for it, they use it conservatively to enable either an FIR filter or an FFT in the FPGA fabric based on NI’s RFNoc topology for their USRP devices in the eventual use in satellites where only reconfiguring part of the design can be a critical advantage in running experiments. I hope projects like this gain more notice because partial reconfiguration (when needed) does need to get better and FPGA tooling needs to get better at supporting the functionality in more intuitive ways. Check out more on their project using the links below.
RadEOT: The Radio Education Outreach Tool – Jamie Williams
This project fully encapsulates the idea of bringing radio education to more students via low cost devices and simple software. The RadEOT device is composed of off the shelf devices including the Raspberry Pi and peripherals, RTL-SDR, 3D printed enclosure, and high capacity USB battery. And its not just the hardware that makes this device so compelling for education, it is also the custom python based interface that makes the different applications easy to use and play with. These applications include FM Radio, Radio Database, Hydrogen Line, and an ADSB Aircraft Tracker. The initial roll out of the devices are starting in December 2020 to 3 schools and more applications are slated to include satellite tracking, ultrasound integration and many more.
Software defined radio based Global Navigation Satellite System real time spoofing detection and cancellation – Jean-Michel Friedt
Wow what another great talk fro Jean-Michel! This time he dives deep into SDR processing of GPS signals with the intent on creating computationally efficient ways of detecting and cancelling GPS spoofing and jamming devices. The crux of the algorithms are based on trying to cancel the jammer/spoofer based on the assumption that their signal will be coming from the same place unlike GPS satellites that are at different locations. He also uses a technique called code-less processing to remove the modulation code spreading and resolve the geometric phase. This results in the ability to cancel out the interferer and resolve the original signal by inserting a null. The presentation is packed full of cool processing techniques so its definitely worth your attention!
Homebrew Long-Baseline Interferometry (LBI) for Education and Research – Stephen Wang
The traditional VLBI (Very Long Baseline Interferometry) devices can cost upwards of $270,000, The goal of this project was to create low cost open source alternatives for LBI for students and amateur astronomy researchers. Utilizing the Raspberry Pi, cheap RTL-SDR devices, dipol antennas, and GPS antennas to construct a home-brew LBI system. I am looking forward to seeing more about this project!
https://stargazingtech.github.io
Data Streaming from SDR to Servers for Cognitive Radar and EW Use-Case – Abhay Samant, David Asplund
As the levels of autonomy requirements increase toward higher-order cognition in Radar and EW new challenges are emerging. These challenges are based on the convergence of data from multiple sensors and knowledge from cognitive principles in order to perform the Perception -> Action cycle. This applies acutely to large arrays of SDRs that can generate multi-hundreds of gigabits per second of data where care is needed to design systems capable of ingesting that data effectively. The talk goes on to analyze a couple different server system topologies for connecting tens of Ettus N320 SDRs to a Server.
The other thing that the talk touches on is the way new server hardware is being used for this kind of application. GPU servers, that enable easy access to many PCIE slots, can be used to host several Network interface cards or (NICs) pared with high core count CPUs for dedicated core processing per SDR device.
Security Analysis of Zigbee Networks with Zigator and GNU Radio – Dimitrios-Georgios Akestoridis
This project was undertaken to analyze the security of Zigbee networks which are a low data rate communication standard for mesh networking. Their test bed consisted of a USRP N210 that could be used to analyze IQ signals and do software demodulation of the Zigbee protocol. They then went on to create a WireShark profile for the protocol and used GnuRadio and Scapy to perform packet injection. An ATUSB was also used to perform timing critical attacks. This formed a test bed where the SDR was used for PHY monitoring, a computer running the Zigator software and a USB IEEE 802.15.4 adapter to perform selective jamming. They also captured a huge data set archive for further research.
They found that a main attack that was able to disconnect a device from a network learn more about the attack in the video.
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