Exactly, I am looking for a suitable authentication library in go since long time, but I cannot finding anything. Things like authboss are not really usable at all.
Or Bluetooth. There are some problems (like MAC randomization) to get a real tracking with BLE, but to have a rough estimation, it's a good technique.
And you can do it with just an ESP32.
The idea is to scan every minutes for BLE MAC Addresses and send to a backend.
On the backend you can identify what is the manufacturer of every MAC addresses and make some correlation.
A very simple idea is to filter only the phone MAC addresses and use as presence counter estimator; it's a bit unlikely that a university student will have more than one phone.
A better method would try to correlate not random MAC addresses (headphones, BLE trackers, wearebles, etc) that are frequently together and mark as a single person.
Around 10 years, in Italy a very populistic party was raising and he was leaded by a very stupid leader that used the social a lot. Then I wrote a Twitter bot (it was possible at that time) that looked like a militant of the party and that was trained over the leader's tweets (nothing fancy, just a big Markov chain). It was so funny when people, also high level of the party start liking and retweeting the bot posts, I ended having several thousands of followers just writing bullshits.
I would like to learn how GAN are working, then I scraped the official pictures of Italian politicians since 30 years and try to generate new faces with a GAN trained to this dataset. Unfortunately I need a lot of computing power to obtain an acceptable face, and I did not want to spend money for that.
Several years ago I wrote a Tinder bot to collect spam messages and malicious links. I stopped early because I got messages from several of people that I know personally in a relationship or even married
The problem exists in Italy: criminal organizations sell a box (called "pezzotto") that connect to illegal streams (mainly sport events).
But the law to block it was written in a very terrible way and this tool is even worst.
I used to ask the same thing back when car stereos were all the rage --- I wondered why I couldn't get shortwave or SSB or Air/VHF reception and the answer lies in use-case. Yeah, you and I might eat up this super niche product, but the market on the whole would not.
Just look at what electric car makers are doing with AM radio. They're saying "screw RFI problems, we'll not filter those and just remove AM reception from the car radio because who needs that?" The answer is a larger slice of the population than would want other radio services.
Even Apple never enabled the FM receiver feature on their chips from Qualcomm. It's all about the time spend designing it, ensuring it doesn't cause issues with must-have features, is intuitive to access/use, _and_ aligns with buyer demands.
With ham radio making up less than 1% of most countries' populations, the need just isn't there. (Most folks you talk to are doing good just to even be aware of ham radio, let alone actually be a ham.)
Yes, but think about having a mobile that has native integration with APRS or can make voice/packet radio or even DMR. It would be perfect for hiking or adventures.
Even better with LORA.
forgive my ignorance here please, but I've read about APRS on and off for a few years and always wondered what I'd need to just transmit some data that would eventually make it's way to the internet. I recently suggested it to a Ornithologist friend doing back country research in South Afrika too.
But why are there no regularly recommended cheap hardware solutions that can do this (and or just hobbyist builds using an RPI). Seems like the demand would be there but perhaps I'm just not understand all thats involved.
Any insight you could provide would be appreciated.
APRS is actually pretty simple protocol. Data is encoded by modulating tones in a human's hearing spectrum, so if you tuned into the APRS frequency with any-purpose scanner (like most Baofengs), you would hear your childhood if you are old enough to remember 52k modems. The sound wave is easy to decode and encode with software. There are plenty of programs (Linux even has dedicated kernel modules) which turn your sound card into a modem, and the missing piece is the radio.
Now, there are different approaches. If your goal is to receive only, you can plug the headphone output of the cheapest Baofeng scanner into the microphone input of your PC, run the software, and you will start seeing messages soon. If you want to transmit, you do the opposite, but you must somehow automatically enable transmission on the radio when the program wants to transmit; there are different methods of doing so, depending on the radio. Basically, you can use anything what can receive and/or transmit audio on 2m bands. Such devices are cheap and easy to buy, so people probably don't bother with assembling a dedicated hardware. Just plug it to the computer.
It's even simpler if you have an HT with a Bluetooth KISS TNC. You just pair the radio to an Android device, and run APRSDroid and off you go. No cables or configuration of a PC needed.
The B-tech UV-PRO and VGC VR-N76 just got firmware updates that allow that. So now you can do it with a $180 radio instead of needing to buy a $900 Kenwood.
thanks for the detailed answer, so following your explanation if I wanted to transmit scientific data at regular intervals (for my friends field work) what sort of licensing / permission would I need?
Funnily enough someone posted down a few comments here almost exactly what I had complained about not existing ( http://www.mobilinkd.com/ ) at least if I understand that page correctly.
I wish they would get LTE/5G peer to peer working. It is defined in spec but barely anything supports it. Then could do any networking instead of limited to ham radio.
What's even more amazing, the local search and rescue helicopters have been outfitted with special 4G/5G base stations. So if they are flying a rescue mission in the mountain or other remote areas, and they come in range of your phone, not only does your phone suddenly have coverage, but they can see you connect, triangulate your position, and call/text you directly.
They exist but they are no-name brands. The phone is crappy, the radio is crappy, and the combo is a big brick. It would be awkward phone with antenna sticking out.
The question is why don't handheld radios have Bluetooth and USB-C data (some have USB-C power).
The common workaround for FM radio was to use the wired earphones plugged into the phone as an antenna. But FM radio is usually extremely, unbelievably strong (a lot of hams know that), so YMMV for other bands with much lower power signals.
The Ulefone Armor 26 is available with a built-in UHF/VHF transceiver, but the software isn't great.
The opposite trend is radically changing business radio - a lot of devices that look like VHF/UHF transceivers are just cellphones. There just aren't a lot of environments where VHF repeaters provide more reliable coverage than LTE & WiFi.
I recently dug up my old iPod Nano 5th gen (small square one) from 2010 and charged it up, and still works fine.
What I forgot, and it totally surprised me, is that it has FM radio! I selected some stations and it worked great. And that Nano was tiny, would be cool to have this feature back in current iPhones / Apple Watches. I know it’s not the same as having full tx/rx on the 2m/70cm bands, but still, even just just listening to normal radio on iPhone would be cool.
> And that Nano was tiny, would be cool to have this feature back in current iPhones / Apple Watches.
That iPod used its headphone cables as the radio antenna. There's no easy way around that for a SmartWatch, and most people wouldn't be happy to carry a USB-C antenna dongle around with them for their iPhone.
You can of course start doing black RF magic with more compact antenna designs, but that's much more complex and still has a much larger footprint on the board than the FM receiver in that iPod nano has.
Ohh right yeah, I remember once reading about the headphone-cable-is-antenna, clever!
I guess that’s why we don’t see it anymore in devices, as everyone is using more wireless headphones.
I remember that my HTC Desire Z Android phone, and possible also the iteration of a Nexus Android phone that I later owned, had FM Radio. It was relatively common back then, and I made use of it almost every day on my bike commute and such.
They used the (wired) earphones plugged into them as an FM antenna, worked well enough.
I recently found my old e-reader (Kindle Keyboard) from 2011 and the first thing I had to do was swap a new battery in, the old one would not hold a charge for too long.
I haven’t played with it long enough, need to check again.
I’m also happy and surprised that all my music files are there and that everything works. I haven’t touched it in probably 4+ years, and was under the impression that flash memory, especially older generation like 2010, can degrade / bitrot if it’s not powered every so often.
I know very little about antenna technology, but physics might play a role. 2m/70cm is pretty far away from the few-cm-wavelengths of somewhat modern cellphones (70cm a bit less so). For FM radio, the common workaround was to use the cable of plugged in wired earphones as antenna, but I don't know how well that would work for bands where the transmitters aren't as unbelievably strong as they are for FM radio.
And then there's of course the fact that almost nobody is asking for that, so the engineering and maintenance effort behind it would be insane in comparison.
If you can parlay it into an 1/8 wavelength, 25cm is probably not impossible to fit into some monstrously meandered beast that could fit in a phone's footprint. We've come a long way in terms of miniaturizing antennas, though I'm no expert.
But I think your second point hits the nail on the head - cell phones have enough antennas in them, and asking to add another one at such a low frequency is a great way to get your antenna and QA teams to look for a more sane employer, and to put your EMC compliance partner's kids through college :)
Anyone that has a real need for something like that is either using either very specialized (and expensive) hardware, or some peripheral solution like TFA. We already have general purpose, mass produced devices that benefit from huge scale, and there's no such scale in amateur radio.
In Italy, if you have a degree in Telecommunication or electronical engineer you just need to pass a reduced version of the exam covering only transmitting rules and not electronic/RF topics.
I did that online few years ago, it was very easy.
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