# 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).

![HackRF](https://jasyohuang.netlify.app/posts/hackrf/hackrf.png align="left")

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.

![hackrf_info](https://jasyohuang.netlify.app/posts/hackrf/hackrf_info.png align="left")

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 !

![hackrf_rx](https://jasyohuang.netlify.app/posts/hackrf/hackrf_rx.png align="left")

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.