Turn a WiFi 7 Router into a 320Msps Software Defined Radio Receiver

This same devloper also built an SDR out of an ESP32 Wi-Fi microcontroller [1], this is awesome!

This development makes me hope that we'd be seeing more of these on common Wi-Fi cards, so that every random laptop could be used as an SDR for many fun and useful applications on a budget.

https://github.com/h0m3us3r/eSpDR

FYI, since it's the same chipset I'm pretty certain this will work on the Banana Pi R4, which has built in PCIe for NVMe.

Is this kind of thing why samsung asks you to sign a contract before letting third parties use the FM radios on their phones? Because many phone radios nowadays are software defined?

Having done repairs on a ton of older service monitors, and having my hand in SDR, this is amazing! There's a huge amount of machining and hardware to make a service monitor, but with desktop CNC, cheap PCBS, and jelly bean components that go into the 10s of GHz, the sky's the limit.

I'd add a heat sunk 100 watt DC-5Ghz 20dB fixed attenuator, 0-110 dB switched attenuator, 5 ghz low pass filter, 7-12 Ghz local oscillator/mixer up/down converter, and it would make a small, very high performance service monitor good to 5 Ghz. 8)

Wow that's super cool! It's not DC to daylight but I sure don't know a cheaper way to get a 320 Msps receiver at 5 GHz.

Thanks claude

I can't keep up with the rapid, non stop cool stuff being discovered! Someone figured out how to get the ESP32 to transmit, at lower bandwidth (I think I read 200-250khz) I don't know which project it was but there are a bunch on this site:

https://www.rtl-sdr.com/esp32-sdr-turbo-mode-throughput-impr...

What is the radio quality like SNR?

$80 here? https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DR7KMNC4

That's quite a good deal...

wow, could this be turned into a 2.4ghz SAR? I always wondered if it’d be possible to use something like that to pick up wifi signals from much farther away. Of course a more sensible choice would just be to use a yagi antenna

What do normal people use SDRs for? I'm genuinely curious. Or is it just cool to do?

An accurate description is "turn an SDR into an SDR".

Anyone know how to get ahold of a device in Europe?

Super awesome.

Not the point but the Airhona could here is really neat. AN7581 with typical quad Cortex-A53 but then 8x RISC-V network coprocessors. Good luck figuring out how to use that though, whew! (Go Astra go.) https://www.airoha.com/products/p/NpfqGLnZiZuYUZ6N

I've been thinking how beautiful and awesome it is that SDR finally has a real jump. The QuadRF using the rpi's mipi connector was such a glorious hack! Custom ADC from parts. 80MSps. https://www.crowdsupply.com/scale-rf/quadrf

And man what a huge flying leap forward here. 320MSps! Much deeper 14b IQ precision vs 8b. The totally custom mediatek radio firmware is incredible. Such incredible possibility. Maybe someday the mimo can be useful for some of the same neat AoE / beam forming capabilities?

Am I understanding that this is doing something the chipset wasn’t designed to do?

I’m not seeing a synopsis of the significance of this, for the uninitiated

What is Msps? I’m not familiar with that scale

Now if you could also make it transmit such samples a few of those could make a nice DIY phase array for some of the most fun bands to play with.