[tiagod]

>Note: Transceiver SDR devices do exist of course, but they tend to be very pricey

A HackRF clone is cheaper than a Flipper, and way more capable in my opinion. I would bet most flippers either lie in drawers or are used by stupid teenager kiddies for trolling.

[tibbon]

I've got a Flipper, LimeSDR (non-mini), some old-school ham equipment, a cheapo $10 RTL-SDR receiver, a few cheap HTs, some RFID tools, etc.

Each has their use. The Flipper is nice for quick and lightweight checking of things. LimeSDR is incredibly capable, but also a bit of a pain in the ass to use. Not something you'll flip out to quickly check something or run an experiment.

[MuffinFlavored]

> checking of things

like what?

[diggan]

Biggest value I got from my Flipper was when a security company was installing a security alarm in my business local, and made a claim that their tags were "unhackable" and "unclonable".

~20 seconds and one cloning later, the installer said something like "Wow, guess we need to update the employee handbook" and I no longer felt comfortable with the installation so asked them to leave after that.

I also once forgot the garage opener to the public garage I usually use, but had the signal saved on my Flipper, so that saved me like 5 minutes of not having to park, go home, go to the car and then park inside the garage.

Otherwise, it's mostly just for fun.

[0x457]

Out of curiosity - does flipper handle cloning of IC/ID 125khz/13.56Mhz fobs and is smart enough to trick the receiver into accepting it?

Reading and cloning of those fobs was easy, but the receiver wasn't accepting reusable fobs. I had to buy a special write-once fob from Lab401.

[greenavocado]

Door handles

[byteknight]

I have both. They both enjoy the warmth of my drawer :)

[bongodongobob]

Realest comment here. I have a few drawers full of these kind of toys I used once and forgot about. Right next to my serial cables and bits of wire.

[MikeTheGreat]

Your post inspired a random but genuine question:

Does anyone have a good use for obsolete cables?

Like, I've got some serial cables, some co-ax, a bunch of old TV cables, some audio cables.

I tell myself I'm keeping them because if I ever need them I'll never be able to (or want to) buy them again. Moreover it feels like such a waste to throw them away.

Maybe a makerspace could make use of them?

[EasyMark]

I have a box in my garage and if cables start overflowing I go through and toss anything that makes it overflow that seems the least useful or likely to be used. It keeps me from starting a new box. :) . I have another box of old gadgets in static bags but I still have a ton of room left in that :)

[dekhn]

I'm holding on to my coax for a few more years and then getting rid of all of it (electronics recycling, probably). I am so looking forward to never using coax again.

[aareet]

You could make some sort of art - in the climbing community old ropes often become chalk bags or carpets etc.

[abakker]

You've made me imagine a doormat made out of old cat5 and usb cables, and I'm horrified in an amused kind of way.

[jonah]

My local search and rescue team made door mats for their station with old 1/2" ropes. They came out really nicely.

Doing so with serial or coax cables seems like an invitation for bits of the plastic sheath breaking off in a few months and polluting the ground around your door though...

[alias_neo]

> I would bet most flippers either lie in drawers or are used by stupid teenager kiddies for trolling

I find my FZ most useful, not for the radio stuff, but as a wireless (read: untethered) way to dump and write EEPROMs using a POMONA clip, otherwise, yes, it sits in a drawer.

[stavros]

> A HackRF clone is cheaper than a Flipper

Yes, but a "HackRF clone, plus a Proxmark3, plus IR, plus whatever" probably isn't.

[AnarchismIsCool]

The flipper isn't really a full sdr though, it just has a very minimalist RF IC that has almost non-existent bandwidth.

For $400 you can get a limeSDR mini that can read and write 30MHz of spectrum at a time, ie the entire ham 70cm band all at once.

If you think a flipper is dangerous, plug in a dummy load and dump noise on L1 then watch your phones GPS stop working, or alternatively decide it's on another continent.

[stavros]

That's true, but more people want to do a little bit of everything than a lot of something. That's why the Flipper is popular.

[AnarchismIsCool]

I think it's a case of good marketing and good packaging. Realistically you need a laptop to do serious field stuff with a flipper, but only if you plan on doing any testing and reconfiguration and only initially. The flipper isn't much bigger than the limesdr card, but it's nicely packaged and portable so once you have it ready to go you can throw it in a pocket.

The community also helps. The flipper is wildly overpriced for being a glorified happy meal toy but millions of people squeezing every ounce of functional potential out of a happy meal toy is better than a few dozen people writing academic papers with mostly high end industrial (cellular base station) and military applications.

[twosdai]

And it has a fun dolphin mascot!

[shon]

Yeah!

[MuffinFlavored]

what benefit does being able to read the entire ham 70cm at once bring/what usecases does it unlock? interested in learning

[AnarchismIsCool]

Depends very broadly on your area of interest, but to throw out some random numbers and thoughts:

If you want to move data between two points, 30MHz of "bandwidth", depending on noise and signal, can be on the order of 30MB/s data rates or more assuming you're good at doing QAM or similar modulation. That's 50x what the CC1101 in the flipper maxes out at

If you want to search for a particular signal of interest (ie why does turning on my LED lamp open my garage door), that's more spectrum you can view at once, about 3x wider than what an RTL-SDR can receive. Similarly, you can view the entirety of a 30MHz wide emission as opposed to only seeing pieces of it.

You could monitor two different narrow bandwidth signal sources that are within ~30MHz of each other simultaneously, ie the 101.5FM broadcast channel and 121.5 airband guard channel. This provides the capabilities of something like a police radio scanner, covering the entire VHF or UHF land mobile band but without having to stop listening to find another signal and the ability to record the entire spectrum capture to disk so you can review all concurrent transmissions separately at a later time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterfall_plot#/media/File:SDR...

Above is a spectrum plot of an FM broadcast station using wide FM modulation and with some digital sub carriers on either side for song info etc. Other stations will be to the left and right of it and the "bandwidth" of the receiver determines how wide the plot you can view is.

[hex4def6]

Kind of a tangent, but websdr.org is one of those sites that you can spend hours searching for interesting radio signals in waterfall plots.

[baby_souffle]

Comes in handy when you’re hunting for a signal but don’t know where it is exactly. Think flash light with wide beam versus narrow beam.

[livueta]

Decoding trunked protocols frequently involves simultaneously listening to the control channel and data channels. If you only have access to low-bandwidth receivers, you'll need multiple, which gets into time sync problems.

[wallaBBB]

Why would you need such a stack? Article is analyzing unidirectional fobs, HackRF is half duplex so you could easily capture and analyze and/or replay the signal. Only additional thing you need is a PC.

One thing to consider is that the payload will be encrypted so you wont be really able to tell apart what is the rolling code. Hopefully fobs have stronger encryption so collecting enough sniffs and analyzing is insufficient (looking at tesla with their 64bit encryption, hopefully they upgraded).

Honda replay myth mentioned in the article is BS, it was popularized by ppl faking a simple replay attack while doing a more complicated one. If you record the fob command and the car never receives it, of course you can immidiatly after replay it to the car and car will accept it since RC is valid. But if you're sniffing while car is receiving it, RC gets updated. If Honda didn't have RC, it would have been far worse than the KIA boys (overriding immobilizer protection and hotwiring the car) issue that did a lot of damage to KIA in US.

[alexb_]

Ok but do the clones have a cute dolphin? Very important feature