Building a Mobile RF Intelligence Platform
Introduction I turned a Raspberry Pi 4B into a mobile RF intelligence platform that runs headless, logs every Wi-Fi network it passes with GPS coordinates, captures packets, scans LTE bands for cell towers, and is accessible remotely from anywhere through a reverse SSH tunnel. After several drives I have 6,838 unique networks catalogued across 12 sessions, with a custom Flask dashboard to explore the data. The Hardware Raspberry Pi 4B - headless, runs everything Alfa AWUS036AXML - dual-band Wi-Fi adapter, MediaTek MT7921AU chipset, native monitor mode on Linux G-Mouse USB GPS antenna (u-blox 8) - shows up as /dev/ttyACM0, NMEA at 9600 baud HackRF One - SDR covering 1 MHz to 6 GHz for LTE cell scanning VPS (DigitalOcean) - relay for the reverse SSH tunnel The whole rig runs off a USB power bank and fits in a case. ...