Of all the SDRs I own, it has the cleanest reception and has become my go-to hardware for SDR reception. It does have some LO leakage but it is easy to ignore the 10 MHZ spikes. Compared to the RTL-SDR, it certainly has much wider coverage but suffers from more aliasing. If I were only interested in Rx, I would probably have returned it. I honestly considered returning it but decided against it since I plan on using it for Tx as well. I would almost give it positive praise if it weren't for the aliasing problems. The HackRF benefits greatly from some front end filtering. I can pick up that station very strong at 84.9 MHZ and also at 104.9 MHZ. For example, a very strong FM station near me is 94.9 MHZ. It causes aliasing problems with strong signals as well. The LO doesn't just show up as spikes every 10 MHZ. There is a strong problem with the LO (10 MHZ) polluting the signal as well. Strong signals tend to alias very easily. This device, used alone, is plagued with RF aliasing problems simply because it has almost no front end filtering.

If you are looking for a 'plug in and surf the RF spectrum' this might not be the best purchase. We recommend the ANT500 Telescopic Antenna as a starter for the HackRF One. The HackRF One acts in just this way, an all-in-one SDR in a small enclosure a little bigger than a cell phone.Įvery HackRF One is protected by an injection molded plastic enclosure and ships with a micro USB cable.

It's like a very fast sound card with the speaker and microphone replaced by an antenna. Just as a sound card in a computer digitizes audio waveforms, a software radio peripheral digitizes radio waveforms. It is similar to the software-based digital audio techniques that became popular a couple of decades ago. SDR is the application of Digital Signal Processing to radio waveforms. A Software Defined Radio is essentially a radio communication device that implements the use of software instead of the typically implemented hardware (these would include mixers, amps, and modulators for example). If you are wondering what a SDR actually is, it's OK we can help. Designed to enable test and development of modern and next generation radio technologies, HackRF One is an open source hardware platform that can be used as a USB peripheral or programmed for stand-alone operation. This is the HackRF One, a Software Defined Radio (SDR) peripheral capable of transmission or reception of radio signals from 1MHz to 6GHz.

Hackrf one