:: Deepquest ::

Finally received days ago a Portapack with a bundle of 5 antennas covering from 1Mhz to 6GHz. Portapack is just a standalone HackRF One with a touch screen. The band coverage makes the usage virtually limitless: interception, replay, broadcast from most frequencies.

There are hundreds of sites and video around to describe and help you to solve issues or show you demos. One of my favorite channel is Tech Mind (twitter) very useful and covers a wide range of SDR topics. RTL-SDR is also full interesting articles and reviews about hardware, SDR and bunch of others.

Back to my Portapack one of the fun usage is ADS-B to monitor airplanes around you. Basically you do locally what Flighaware or Flightradar24 does. You will get the position, altitude and other info. You can also plot the plane on a map. The default map has a very low resolution and is almost useless.

A better mapping requires a larger map, keep in minds that the Portapack is standalone no internet connection to download map.

To generate the map do as follow, assuming you run the latest Havoc firmware.

Make sure that the sdcard you use on the Portapack is 32Go maximum formated in fat32. This due to the fat32 limitation.

git clone https://github.com/furrtek/portapack-havoc.git

( if you haven’t already done on your computer)

Copy all content of /PortaPack/portapack-havoc-master/sdcard to the root of the sdcard.

To generate the high resolution (450 meg) map:

cd /portapack-havoc/tree/master/firmware/tools
python adsb_map.py

If the you get the error “ImportError: No module named PIL” install it:

sudo apt-get install python-pil then rerun python adsb_map.py

It will take about 5 minutes due to the size of the map about 444 Mo.
The file will be generated on your computer under portapack-havoc/sdcard/ADSB/world_map.bin
Copy portapack-havoc/sdcard/ADSB/world_map.bin to your sdcard/ADSB/world_map.bin

Insert the sdcard in the portapack et voila!

Feel free to comment bellow if I missed anything.

PS: a big thanks to furrtek for his amazing job on the Custom firmware for the HackRF One/PortaPack. Sacré Français