Pocket FM
pocket-fm.comIs this someone's attempt at marketing SDR to the masses? This is nothing new, and I'm surprised to see how little information they put forward about it.
It's just a low power FM station with a raspberry pi in it as a controller. It would be highly illegal to use this device in most modern nations without a license.
The Nokia N900 could broadcast short-range FM with RDS, I'm not sure what advantages this has.
higher power. The n900's transmitter was 15nW (1.5e-8 W), which is why it was legal. For a claimed 6km radius, I would assume this is about 3-7W output.
A 6km radius would fit quite well with schemes like Community Radio in the UK:
http://consumers.ofcom.org.uk/tv-radio/radio/a-guide-to-comm...
...still need a licence, of course.
This seems like a bad idea. It would make targeting dissent with kinetic means very easy. It's one of the whole reasons that shortwave broadcasts are still around.
How so? What off the shelf guidance systems exist to home in on FM radio?
I'm sure there are tons of anti-SAM guidance packages which will steer something towards a SAM transmitter, but that's in an entirely different frequency band from what I remember.
Terminal guidance systems tend to be in the UHF and SHF bands, generally gigahertz and up where as FM is VHF at about 100MHz.
It'd take a fair amount of work to re-engineer a guidance package to find such a lower power FM transmitter and perform terminal guidance on it. Especially when the world is awash in FM all around there too.
It's this easy.
It's a very interesting talk but from what I saw that's not a terminal guidance package by any means. The antennas would need to be too big to fit into a missile. Also it doesn't work very well in an urban environment as the end of the talk shows.
There's a huge difference between targeting the radar of an aircraft or a ship or a mobile SAM site and targeting a cell phone.
You don't need a complex guidance package when traditional direction finding and triangulation will produce coordinates that can be used to direct artillery, air strikes, IED, etc. Sigint targeting is quite common.