MSAWS Prototype - Mobile Spectrum Awareness System

RF situational awareness in a shoebox.

1 Introduction

Information is key, and the key is information. This project started as a quest to explore the possibilities of integrating SBCs with SDR hardware in a portable platform combined with a distributed S/W framework to serve as a field-unit for mobile signals intelligence operations.

2 Implementation

2.1 Hardware impressions

2.2 Software

The system runs on a software framework with at it's core an ASGI (Asynchronous Server Gateway Interface), in this case uvicorn. The ASGI interface connects to FastAPI which performs the function invocations in the Python threads which control the Devices, Processes and Applications. This allows for easy system manipulation via HTTP1.1 GET/PUT/POSTS methods. The Python threads controlling the processes can range from a commandline decoder to decode APRS via an audio interface, through to starting a VNC session or starting navigation/mapping software. The intention is to make complex application flow, configuration and control easily accessible via an API interface (which performs HTTP requests to the server), therefore eliminating local commandline interaction with the system. In parallel system data is dumped to an influxdb database, and exposed via Grafana, allowing easy local or remote system monitoring.

The main project page can be found here

All images © Tom Mladenov