Announcing the HackRF Beta

Jared Boone and I had the honor of presenting the keynote at ToorCon 14 over the weekend. In our talk, HackRF: A Low Cost Software Defined Radio Platform, we described our project to build a low cost, open source, wideband, portable Software Defined Radio peripheral. You can watch video of the presentation or download the slides.

In addition to introducing HackRF to the ToorCon audience, we announced the HackRF beta test program. Thanks to DARPA's Cyber Fast Track (CFT) program, we are able to build a few hundred HackRF Jawbreakers and will distribute them to ToorCon attendees as soon as they are completed (hopefully around December). Each attendee of ToorCon 14 (and also the recent GNU Radio Conference) received a unique beta invitation code that can be redeemed for a Jawbreaker as soon as the hardware is ready to ship.

Jared and I are very excited to be able to give away so many beta units. I'm not sure if any open source hardware project has had such a well funded beta program, but we think that giving away hardware in exchange for feedback (and hopefully some code) is a good trade in keeping with open source ideals.

If you have an invitation code, look for an announcement on the HackRF page around December telling you how to redeem your code for a Jawbreaker. I know there are many of you out there who wish you had an invitation code, and I'm sorry that our funding for the beta program is finite! The redemption system, once it is live, will include a way to sign up for a waiting list if you do not have a code. There will probably be some extra beta units that we will distribute to as many on the waiting list as we can.

My hope for the beta program is to validate HackRF Jawbreaker, resulting in a well-tested open source design that anyone can build or modify. I also plan to release a commercial HackRF product (similar to Jawbreaker) that will be available for purchase after the beta.

Thanks for all the kind words of support at ToorCon and since!