How to monitor wireless signals in a room using LabView

[LV_Pro]

Wiebe,

   You don't work for VolksWagen by any chance?  😉

[Blokk]

I would try to find a black hole. To our recent knowledge, you can find the closest supermassive black hole in the center of the Milky Way galaxy. About 27000 light years away from Earth.

Just get your human subject behind the event horizon, no more signals can leak from his mind out...

But if the subject has a brain implant secretly placed there by the government, it could modulate the Hawking radiation of the black hole, thus leaking info back to our spacetime??? THAT would be a problem!

[LV_Pro]

Actually, just getting 27000 light years away should be sufficient, doubt that any signals received back here on Earth 27000 years later would have any practical value to those who might, still, be listening.

[deceased]

Even our crazy caps will be useless at close range. That's why only you, with your defective unreadable brainwave, may be able to thwart them and usher in a new green age of wonder

[cvmohan]

No, I am running my own company to provide integration solutions

[JÞB]

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@cvmohan wrote:

I would like to monitor all the wireless signals around me, it includes mobile signals, IR data, and any other signals. 

So what kind of hardware i need to purchase and how LabVIEW supports this. 

Is there any way to Jam for a particular frequency range of signals ?

Thanks for feedback !

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Several of us posters think that this must be an abnormal request.   On the small chance that you really do have a client that needs this type of solution, You might note that many of the replies show considerable knowledge.  OTOH you might just be what we veterans (Yes, I was honored to serve you so, its my day in the US)  refer to as a whack-job.  If everyone still has all there ducks in one row....shout out.  else, there are others better able to assist.

[Ben]

The widest spectrumun analyzer your budget can accommodate is the best we can offer as a suggestion. Of course, I suspect your client will look outside the supported bandwidth, and then we start the game again.

We can help guide you through the software development when the time comes.

 Ben

[NJKirchner · Accepted solution]

Howdy y'all.... this is just too good to not chime in.

Welcome back Alpha1

@ok, Speaking as a RF Systems Engineer here @ NI I'll see what I can do to help....ish

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@cvmohan wrote:

I would like to monitor all the wireless signals around me, it includes mobile signals, IR data, and any other signals. 

So what kind of hardware i need to purchase and how LabVIEW supports this. 

Is there any way to Jam for a particular frequency range of signals ?

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You would like to monitor all signals, presumably at all frequencies; DC to Daylight as people are wont to say.
Also, given the nature of your request, I would presume that you can not miss or have gaps in any BW at all through the process of scanning.

If that is the case, you need to have a parallel collection of wide band receivers.

The PXIe-5668 has 768MHz worth of instantaneous bandwidth that is capable of streaming to disk at full data rates that goes from 20Hz to 26GHz.

However to receive that full BW and not lose a single Hz of data, I think you would have to have about 26 PXIe-5668 Analzyers with preamplifier and filter bank in front of it.

Each taking about 8 slots in a chassis, which allows you to have 2 per 18 slot chassis, you would need 13 PXIe-1085 chassis along with controller along with a RAID solution to log the data and a PXIe-8880 controller per chassis. The HDD-8266 would be the right tool for that solution.

The front end filtering that would be needed as well would be quite tricky to figure out, however you could use a healthy purchase from minicircuits.
Also to keep in mind dynamic range, presuming you need amazing dynamic range, you could cut 768MHz in portions and amplify certain bands, so I would say that you should at least expect to double your system count, and maybe just round it off to 50 separate analyzers.

Beyond the 26GHz range, we have our mmWave SDR platform which would allow you to see frequencies in certain bands up to 70GHz.

Now expecting that once you find a signal you'll want to determine the direction it came from, you'll need all of this x4.

So at the current count

You'll roughly need at least

125 PXI chassis

125 PXI controllers

250 5668+preamplifier

500 RAID Drive systems

5 mmWave SDR systems

1000 RF filters of varying bands

Now beyond this you're looking at filling the gaps in frequencies for which you should look into designing your own downconverters to get things into the sub 6GHz band to use our VST 2.0 PXIe-5840.

I suggest talking with Hiller Measurements to take you this last mile.

All things added up... you're looking at about a 1 Billion US dollar system.... no, I'm not kidding.

Should you like to build this system, I'll gladly give up my role as an RF System Engineer and become your personal sales person.

I'll only require a nominal 2% up front fee.

Now onto the jamming. Unfortunately we don't have nearly as robust a system for generation, but our PXIe-5840 does give you the ability to generate a 9kHz to 6GHz signal at 1GHz worth of bandwidth, but since you'll already have quite a view 5840 for the analysis, you've already got these in your system.

For IR data you'll need to hit up your local radio shack to find some IR LED.

When it comes to software, look up LabVIEW Communications Design suite and get back with us.

[NJKirchner]

I've been working on a wave interference simulator in LabVIEW.

I'm not sure its an accurate depiction of the situation at hand, but for some reason I couldn't stop staring at it...

Mind control.... hard to say.

[JÞB]

When you get that good.

Ask for four percent up front and a reservered seat on Champion row for NI week 

Those seats are nice, if you can get them.