Starting My Journey with HackRF

Well this might be my first “content” created on my site. I wanted the topic HackRF to be the first as this thing is also new for me so I think it’d be interesting if i documented the whole journey with this tool.

so what is HackRF ?

as per product description says, HackRF is a SDR (Software Defined Radio) half duplex transciever. It means, it can do transmitting and receiving radio signal (bot not both at the same time) and can be controlled via software.

is this my first tool on radio ?

no, my interest begin with playing with HAM radios and use it to listen to local HAM community and communicating with my friends (also on legally HAM frequency). Then i tried receiver SDR which i got from RTL-SDR. What makes HackRF much more interesting than all the tools i had before is because it is a transceiver (not only receiver) and supports very wide range of frequency : 1MHz to 6GHz

where i got mine ?

I got my HackRF from a local e-commerce store and I didn’t actually buy the original SDR board. Instead, I bought a HackRF H4M Portapack. So basically, a portapack is an additional board put on top the SDR board, given a battery, a screen and a control dial making it portable and can be use anywhere (without an actual PC to control the SDR board).

image taken from google but i did got the actual same thing..

Alright.. let’s try connecting to the computer !

You can use any OS you want but i personally use linux on VMware. Some tools might be Linux oriented but hey I’m a windows user so i still use VMware.

Well.. it’s connected but turns out it is not the original manufactured by GSG… Maybe some kind of chinese made.. But hey it works !

tried listening my voice from my HAM radio and it works well receive is working for now. Proof that hackrf i bought is not a scam.

Conclusion

so i think that’s it.. What is HackRF, what it can do, how i first setup and proof that it’s working as it should be. See you in other articles and see what I’ll do next.