Recently, due to the heavy rainfall in Henan, many areas lost communications and utilities. Many people’s situations couldn’t be reported in time. Seeing my long-dusty HackRF One at home, I finally decided to make an emergency distress radio station. (Actually, I’d had this idea long ago, but back then I was playing games and was preparing for a nuclear war)
The one drawback is that this thing is half-duplex; it can’t send and receive signals at the same time.
ParrotSec + GNURadio (PLAN A)
I highly recommend ParrotSec. It’s many times better looking than Kali, and has many more tools than Ubuntu. WSL can go crawl. I originally thought that with WSL I could throw VMware into the trash, but I found out WSL doesn’t support USB. So I had to get VMware back.
After a certain version, ParrotSec no longer includes GNURadio by default, so you need to manually apt install gnuradio.
Windows + GNURadio (PLAN B)
I’d already gotten it working under ParrotSec, but then I suddenly remembered that GNURadio has a Windows version, and I don’t really like using VMware anyway (it feels too bloated). So I tried the gnuradio for Windows that I’d abandoned years ago. The reason I abandoned it was that it wouldn’t open after installation. After downloading it again, I found that after several iterations, the Windows version of gnuradio has become just as capable as the Linux version. So I threw VMware into the trash once more. GNURadio Win64 Binaries (The download is really slow, the kind that even IDM can’t save) After installation, remember to add the installation directory\bin folder to PATH. It contains the hackrf tools, so you don’t need to look for them elsewhere - very convenient.