Iridium Satellite Reception

The Iridium Satellite Constellation has been on the agenda of security researchers for quite some time. Their efforts have resulted in easy to use code and guides. This wiki should get you up and running fairly quickly

Most of this information is based off of or from the Munich Chaos Computer Club Slides from the hackRVA talk: Google Doc

Hardware

In order to receive Iridium you are going to need some hardware.

• Software Defined Radio
  • RTL-SDR
  • BladeRf
  • HackRF
  • USRP
  • Most SDRs that have an libosmosdr binding library
• Antennas
  • Passive
    • Taoglas Iridium Antenna
  • Active
    • Modified GPS antenna with replaced filter
• Bias-T if your antenna is active and your SDR doesn't have one built in.
• Decent Computer

Software

It is possible to do this under windows. But I have not tested this and I would imagine it would be too time consuming.

Here is a list of the requisite software in installation order

• Linux OS
• GNU Radio
  • LiveDVD/USB contains most of the software you would need
  • You will also need the -dev packages
• SDR specific library
  • ex: librtlsdr
• libosmosdr
• gr-iridium
  • github
• AMBE Voice codec
  • osmo-ir77 Open Source AMBE decoder
  • Emulated
• gr-toolkit
  • github