radio – Oleg Kutkov personal blog

HackRF SuperCluster

Oleg Kutkov — Mon, 29 Nov 2021 00:37:18 +0000

Who’s following me on Twitter probably knows some details. I believe this is my most expected article. Last year I came up with the idea to build a wideband SDR. It’s fun to monitor a wider spectrum and some signals. Sure, USRP is cool but too expensive for amateur usage. I had a few HackRF boards, so I ordered more…

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Hacking Bluetooth speaker/FM radio firmware

Oleg Kutkov — Sat, 27 Feb 2021 17:32:52 +0000

I have a little Bluetooth speaker/FM radio. This speaker is not perfect, but it is nice for its price. Except for a few annoying things regarding sound notifications. I decided to “fix” those issues. A little bit of reverse engineering was involved. The first problem is annoying and loud turn-on notifications. It sounds like some SMS notification. There is no…

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Small satellite dish with rotator

Oleg Kutkov — Thu, 11 Feb 2021 00:13:15 +0000

Receiving and analyzing radio signals is fun. Receiving satellite signal is even better. A few years ago, I had a nice 3m satellite dish with a hydrogen line receiver. Now I have only a small balcony with limited antennas placement ability. I decided to build a custom 40 cm dish with a servo-based rotator. Sure, it’s impossible to receive weak…

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Reworking linear polarization satellite LNB into a circular polarized

Oleg Kutkov — Sun, 20 Sep 2020 20:56:08 +0000

In this article, I want to discuss different types of satellite LNB, polarization, and depolarization of waves. Also, I’ll show how to rework the LNB. Also, we will discuss a theory to figure out why this rework is working. The primary topic here is Ku-band LNB, but all this also works for the Ka-band and C-band. Here in Europe, we…

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Combining two HackRF SDR to see more

Oleg Kutkov — Wed, 17 Jun 2020 20:28:46 +0000

HackRF One is a popular SDR transceiver and a really nice piece of hardware. For a reasonable price, you can get fully open hardware to monitor radio signals in a wide range (20MHz – 6GHz, but really up to 7GHz). Boards support external clocking and can be easily customized. I believe there is only one concern about this board is…

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Listening to aircrafts and receiving images from the satellites

Oleg Kutkov — Thu, 02 Nov 2017 17:04:13 +0000

In the previous article, we discussed how to calculate and build a simple Yagi-Uda antenna. Now it’s time to play with this antenna and receive some interesting signals. This will be mostly video post. I filmed all experiments and created brief videos. Hope they gonna be interesting, video is in Russian, but English subtitles are also available. As the receiver,…

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144 MHz Yagi-Uda antenna

Oleg Kutkov — Thu, 02 Nov 2017 15:47:27 +0000

Yagi–Uda antenna is a directional and pretty effective antenna consisting of multiple parallel elements in a line, usually half-wave dipoles made of metal rods. The Best-known use of this type of antenna is as rooftop terrestrial television antennas, but it is also used for point-to-point fixed communication links and long-distance shortwave communication by shortwave broadcasting stations and radio amateurs. This…

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