WS4 - Battle-Tested Broadcasts: RF Insights From Ukraine

Instructed by:  Preston Zen

Level of Difficulty: Advanced

Abstract:

Every wireless thing in your life is broadcasting. The question is who's listening - and what they can do with it.

Battle-Tested Broadcasts is a four-hour, hands-on workshop on RF detection and direction finding, framed by the most demanding live laboratory in the world for these techniques: the Ukrainian frontline. We start with universal foundations - frequency, modulation, antennas, what your SDR can and can't see - and pivot into where neural-time RF detection becomes existential: drones. A pilot powers up an FPV controller thirty seconds before impact. Pure RF detection is often the only sensor in the chain that catches the threat before the drone leaves the ground.

We cover what's actually in the air across a contested battlefield slice - controllers, video downlinks, telemetry beacons, battlefield comms, GNSS, and the increasingly exotic bands operators are pushing into to dodge electronic warfare. We dissect the honest limits of common off-the-shelf SDR tooling, and the ways adversaries already evade pure RF detection: from fiber-optic and autonomous drones to wired front-line networks, frequency hopping, and out-of-scan spectrum.

Attendees solder and flash a Signal Compass - a pocket ESP32 signal detector with directional bearing. Rotating lab stations cover passive scanning, fingerprinting, direction finding

Pre-Requisites:

·      Hobbyist-level soldering competence - we will not teach basic soldering.

·      Comfort with the Linux command line.

·      Familiarity with frequency, modulation, and antennas is helpful but not required; RF 101 is covered in the opening segment.

·      No prior SDR experience needed - tooling is introduced from zero.

·      Bring a charged laptop and a curious brain.

A more detailed BOM with purchasing links will be sent via email closer to the workshop date.

At a minimum, students should arrive with:

Hardware

·      Soldering iron (temperature-controlled preferred) with a fine and medium tip

·      Solder (leaded or lead-free, 0.6–0.8 mm)

·      Solder wick and flux / rosin

·      Wire snips / flush cutters

·      Multimeter

·      Helper hands or a PCB holder

·      HackRF if you own one — bring it; we'll share otherwise

·      Laptop with a working USB-A or USB-C port (adapters welcome)

Software (preinstalled before arrival)

·     SDR++ or SDR# (whichever your OS supports)

·     Arduino IDE or PlatformIO with ESP32 board support

·     A serial terminal (screen, minicom, PuTTY, or the IDE's built-in monitor)

·     Git

Linux is preferred but macOS and Windows work fine. No live internet required during the workshop — everything runs offline once installed.