"But The higher the $$$, the harder it is for people to build one. That’s another allure why I like $150. It’s attainable, and many people already have some parts."
It's this kind of pragmatism that's going to make these affordable tools proliferate and constantly pour cold water over the tech companies Privacy-In-Can™ products and services.
You can buy an SDR that'll output reasonably clean RF for about $150 - an Adalm Pluto, a LimeSDR Mini or a HackRF One clone.
The barrier to entry to radio has never been lower, which is very much a mixed bag. A lot of people are doing really stupid, really illegal stuff with cheap radio hardware. Quite aside from the legalities, it's just bad manners to splatter all over the RF spectrum. Listen to the bands, get yourself an amateur license, learn to build a lowpass filter, then press the transmit button.
>The barrier to entry to radio has never been lower, which is very much a mixed bag. A lot of people are doing really stupid, really illegal stuff with cheap radio hardware. Quite aside from the legalities, it's just bad manners to splatter all over the RF spectrum.
I get this, but despite it all, I'm going to be more interested at the end of the day, in principle, in solutions that would involve low cost antenna design/filtration techniques/etc, that make the cheap stuff better compared to the buy one component that's 2x amount of an entire system kind of solutions.
Because the reality is that this genie isn't going to go back into the bottle, legalities aside or not.
It's not RF snobbery, the point is that this approach to transmitting RF signal is shitting all over the spectrum with harmonics and potentially interfering with other legitimate activity.
Sure, you can get shielding and bandpass filters, but by then you're back at $100 bucks and have terrible radio to boot. The Pluto and Lime Mini are very capable transceivers for ~$150.
The RPi isn't going to bring down airliners and start WWIII, but radio spectrum isn't going to work if people don't cooperate and be good neighbors.
"But The higher the $$$, the harder it is for people to build one. That’s another allure why I like $150. It’s attainable, and many people already have some parts."
It's this kind of pragmatism that's going to make these affordable tools proliferate and constantly pour cold water over the tech companies Privacy-In-Can™ products and services.