RF design is very much an art, and the difference between works and works really well without harmonics and noise is a matter of design subtleties and often expensive parts. There are decent SDR setups around $500-700 that are known to be pretty good, but you have to go out of your way to buy them from the actual design houses, because despite being “identical”, the clones are not the same. In RF, the devil is in the details.
replyWhich SDRs would you recommend at the $100, $300, $600, and $1200+ price points?
replyI’m not an expert but I know of a few. Are you looking at recieve only, or transmit/ recieve? What frequency ranges?
replyOff the top of my head
HackRF one- relatively cheap, pretty good transceiver, lots of crappy clones
USRP B205mini, expensive, fast, closer to pro equipment
I like my HackRFOne, but be aware it's half-duplex, so it can transmit as well as receive - but can only do one of them at a time. For a little more money you can get full duplex SDRs, which opens up a bunch of extra interesting sttuff you can do.
replyDo the hackRF folks make a more advanced one? I used to know of a good one around $600 but I can’t seem to remember it.
replyA hackrf is less expensive than a flipper and more capable in every way, except the dolphin gifs.
replyThe flipper's primary use is that looks like a children's toy, which makes it far more effective for demos of how bad an orgs security is to not-especially-technical stakeholders than something like a hackrf or chameleon
Not too far from the truth. The Flipper is good as a toy, but for serious RFID things you want a proxmark 3 clone with Iceman firmware ;)
replyIt’s not a toy, it’s an AIO portable hacking budget device, it’s like comparing your pocket swiss knife to your workshop. Obviously your workshop will be better, but you are not taking it anywhere! I have for example a bladRF and limeSDR for more in depth work in radios, but I do still use flipper occasionally where bringing a laptop+sdr+antenna is hard or impossible, let alone looking like a dork doing so. For rfid, it’s great to put all your keyfobs in one place and backing them up, the condo I live in right now charges $50 if you lost your fob and needed a replacement, among many other usages. And those are some of the very basic use cases where it’s handy to have it portable.
replyI think in Canada they were trying to ban it!