To quote commenter [douyarou], “It’s like our little version of a Precambrian explosion”. A bunch of hackers have discovered, independently and building on each other’s work, software-defined radio (SDR) capabilities …. It all started with [Espargos] and [h0m3us3r] apparently independently discovering that the ESP32 family of chips had a “secret” debug mode that allowed direct access to the radio that’s normally used for WiFi.
While the 2.4 GHz radio signal is almost always immediately converted into data by the MAC hardware, here they found a way to listen in upstream, to the raw IQ data. Seeing this, folks were immediately inspired to find out if they could transmit as well. [marble] not only got transmit functionality working, but integrated the part in with the standard osmosdr data flow, which meant that a whole bunch of existing tools were ready to go.
We didn’t know about it at the time, but apparently [jochenhammes] and [z1000biker] concurrently had their TX-capable hacks up and running: here and here. At this point, folks have already started to use the capabilities for broadcasting digital TV signals, voice signals, FM Hell, and other hijinks.
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