It is cool to do. But there are professional uses for it, particularly like finding interference or noise. You can ask things like: "How crowded is my 2.4 GHz spectrum?"
The RTL SDR is the gateway drug into SDR's. The bandwidth is limited, so don't expect to be capturing HDTV Streams. But it's certainly possible to listen to AM/FM, Ham Bands, VHF/UHF signals, etc.
If you don't want to buy an RTL-SDR, you can search KiwiSDR which is a streaming SDR for frequencies under 30MHz. You can also connect to KiwiSDR's worldwide.
Then if you get the itch, you can go get your a HackRF, a ham license, or whatever else scratches it.
Your statement about complexity is true with most SaaS offerings. They need to be everything to everybody so they can target as large a market as possible.
But as a user if you can identify the exact requirements you need your software to do, then it's very possible to vibe code a solution to do exactly what you're looking for. And your own offering doesn't need to be as complex, and can be tightly coupled to the other infrastructure you have.
I find AI as a good baseline for how 80% of users would approach something. The negative space or that 20% is where it often becomes blurry and contradictory for AI. That's where your expertise in the industry in whatever you're building comes into play, and where you steer the design and functionality from painting yourself into the same corner millions of others vibe-slopped themselves into.
It's also removed the difficulty of configuring a mikrotik router as well. Mikrotik has a cloud router instance which is much easier to deal with I think than linux. Mostly because there's a UI interface for Mikrotik that makes it a little easier to inspect what's going on.
One of my pet projects I need to get back to is an SDN to make configuration for mikrotik routers easier (particularly with VLAN's, wireguard or VPNS, or routing configuration between ports).
Winbox is nice in a sense because it tells you the true configuration. But what I really want is something that can start with a network diagram (e.g.) and then get the current state of the router, and then validate that against the network config.
My favorite example of the heroic engineers are "helicopter" engineers who fly in, "solve" the problem at the expense of something else being made much worse. Usually getting the accolades of upper management.
Then the heroic engineers get promoted and then learn that they can use their weight to shove others around. Meanwhile the ICs that had to do fire drills to make crap happen don't typically get anything out of it, other than watching some manager that shoved them around get promoted.
This reminds me of the experience VRML wanted to be 3 decades ago. The only difference is that links went to other worlds living on another server. But that seems trivial to implement with this.
A little late I know, but yes it was. The problem was the hardware didn't really support what VRML could do at the time. I had access to an SGI irix workstation and VRML (and 3d scenes) was still challenging for it back in the early to mid 1990s.
There's some work going on at the Metaverse Standards Forum to progress these ideas with Web of Worlds (https://webofworlds.github.io/). It's scope is a lot broader than VRML, it covers assets, identity, avatars, payments, etc.
I know a guy in LA who basically spent every waking minute of his life past year or two building a spec for this. Announced soon apparently. I’ve spent hours reading some of it.
I’d bet a lot of money that the NTSB will determine that the pilots’ failure to maintain clearance from terrain during a visual approach will be the primary cause with contributing factors of dark, moonless night and GPS jamming.
That one’s going to be on the flight crew, not the GPS jamming test.
I'm not going to argue that as it's always easy to blame dead people, but there's two different types of jamming.
One is to actually jam the signal IOW preventing reception. The other is to overpower the satellites' signals and replace them with your own. That defeats the doppler calculations of GPS needed for triangulation, and instead the receiver believes it's where the jammer wants it to be.
If the latter includes altitude information, then it's a huge problem.
If you overpower a signal, is there a difference? I'm not saying you're right or wrong here. I'm just saying there's a long history of coverups in the government and military.
If you can say, "oh we were only jamming" when in fact you were spoofing, well that's certainly a super easy excuse to hide behind.
In either case, asking for and being cleared for a visual approach (as the crew did and was) puts the onus on them to maintain continuous visual contact with the airport and to maintain their own terrain and obstacle clearance, which it’s safe to say they didn’t do.
>If you overpower a signal, is there a difference?
Yes, obviously. Losing signal on your GPS unit, and having your GPS unit tell you that you are in a different position than you actually are, are two very different things.
Also, since other aircraft reported GPS issues, that is evidence that would speak to jamming or spoofing. All three other aircraft reported a loss of GPS, not inaccurate GPS. Coverups are real, government conspiracies are real. But the completely evidenceless “I’m just saying…” or “isn’t it weird…” or “I’m just asking questions” is tiresome.
The potential for widespread radiation leakage from nuclear doesn't exist with wind or solar. I would think a terrorist would hit a nuclear power plant over any wind or solar farms.
The Chernobyl exclusion zone will remain uninhabitable for the next 20,000 years.
If refugees were allowed to live there, I wonder how many people would choose radiation over their current worse situations?
The article mentions people moving from Donbas (perhaps less inhabitable): "Following the outbreak of the war in Donbas in 2014, refugees from that conflict settled in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone or nearby".
Terrorists are only one piece of the issue. Corporations and "Responsible Adults" have done more to harm nuclear power in this country than any terrorist act has.
ConEd and Three Mile Island meltdown brought out a mass of normal people to chant "Hell No! We won't Glow!"
Hanford in Washington State.
San Onofre in So Cal.
Santa Susana Meltdown.
The reality is that everyone wants nuclear, but no one wants to live near a nuclear power plant.
This kind of "purity" argument is absolutely toxic. We've seen it with the vietnam paper comparing ORMs to SQL, etc. etc. Please stop this. You didn't hire him, you certainly aren't willing to give him a salary for him to live off of.
If you want to complain about LLMs used in software, advocate for a voluntary LLM disclosure published in the docs someplace, so people can make informed decisions.
The RTL SDR is the gateway drug into SDR's. The bandwidth is limited, so don't expect to be capturing HDTV Streams. But it's certainly possible to listen to AM/FM, Ham Bands, VHF/UHF signals, etc.
If you don't want to buy an RTL-SDR, you can search KiwiSDR which is a streaming SDR for frequencies under 30MHz. You can also connect to KiwiSDR's worldwide.
Then if you get the itch, you can go get your a HackRF, a ham license, or whatever else scratches it.
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