I’ve been playing with software-defined radios like this one, but they’re limited to 1.7 GHz or so, and WiFi doesn’t start until 2.4GHz.
What sort of equipment will I need to be able to see WiFi signals in the raw? I’d like to downshift it to the audible range and have a little speaker that illustrates what WiFi sounds like as you walk around.
I know I can just use a standard WiFi receiver and interpret the data coming from it, but that doesn’t make for interesting acoustics. Is there any way relatively cheap way to listen in on the radio signals directly?
He’s basically made a signal strength meter that beeps. That’s not the same as listening to the radio waves before the wifi adapter translates them into data.
(It’s the difference between seeing data packets and seeing a spectrogram. What he’s working with is much higher level on the network stack than I’m hoping to play with.)
It’s an idea I’ve wanted to try for a few years now, and reading about that a few days/weeks ago piqued my curiosity again. I was initially excited to hear that someone’s done it, but that quickly turned to disappointment once I found out 1) he was doing it at such a high level (there was no “hacking” needed, any basic wifi app can do that) and 2) he actually got grant money and news coverage for something so simple.
Edit: To be fair, though, his project is far more useful to the human ear than listening to the radio waves would be. It actually summarizes information for you, presenting melodic interpretations of accessible hotspots. Listening to the waves, on the other hand, would probably just sound like noise.
Downconvertors as used for satellite communications.
802.11 uses 20 Mhz of bandwidth, but the satellites use 5…
So it will put 2.401-2.405 at 144 Mhz-149 Mhz,
and You can then run an audio demodulator from that.
Of course, 802.11b will be static-like … its just random ups and downs without doing the required demodulation and decoding.
And also more expensive purpose-built SDRs ($300 to $800) that have greater frequency ranges:
I don’t think demodulating anything would be necessary, since this is just for fun. Actually trying to analyze the hotspots for practical use would be better accomplished with something like a wifi analyzer app.
