Wi-Fi 7 router turned into a 320 Msps software-defined radio
Turn a WiFi 7 Router into a 320Msps Software Defined Radio Receiver
A Gemtek W1700K Wi-Fi 7 router becomes a wideband SDR receiver. Its MediaTek MT7996 radio captures raw 14-bit IQ at up to 320 Msps, streamed over 10 GbE by the Airoha AN7581 SoC. Custom firmware replaces MediaTek's, bringing the radio up from cold power-on. A Linux host displays live spectrum and waterfall in a browser with controls. It supports 2.4, 5, and 6 GHz bands, arbitrary LO tuning, and real-time retuning.
The MT7996 runs only our own firmware: a ROM patch, WM and WA built from this repository, with no MediaTek code.
- yonatan8070
This same devloper also built an SDR out of an ESP32 Wi-Fi microcontroller [1], this is awesome!
This development makes me hope that we'd be seeing more of these on common Wi-Fi cards, so that every random laptop could be used as an SDR for many fun and useful applications on a budget.
- thebeardisred
FYI, since it's the same chipset I'm pretty certain this will work on the Banana Pi R4, which has built in PCIe for NVMe.
- alightsoul
Is this kind of thing why samsung asks you to sign a contract before letting third parties use the FM radios on their phones? Because many phone radios nowadays are software defined?
- mikewarot
Having done repairs on a ton of older service monitors, and having my hand in SDR, this is amazing! There's a huge amount of machining and hardware to make a service monitor, but with desktop CNC, cheap PCBS, and jelly bean components that go into the 10s of GHz, the sky's the limit.
I'd add a heat sunk 100 watt DC-5Ghz 20dB fixed attenuator, 0-110 dB switched attenuator, 5 ghz low pass filter, 7-12 Ghz local oscillator/mixer up/down converter, and it would make a small, very high performance service monitor good to 5 Ghz. 8)
- aftbit
Wow that's super cool! It's not DC to daylight but I sure don't know a cheaper way to get a 320 Msps receiver at 5 GHz.