QuadRF | Crowd Supply

Scale RF

Video & Cameras

Software Defined Radio

QuadRF

A 4x4 MIMO SDR tile for spatial RF vision & beamforming that scales as a phased array

$131,670 raised

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131% Funded!

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Back this project to help bring it into existence.<br>Funding ends on Aug 06, 2026 at 04:59 PM PDT.

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QuadRF brings phased-array technology down to Earth into an accessible education and development kit. At its core, QuadRF is a 4x4 MIMO software-defined radio (SDR) tile with an open antenna architecture. Powered by an integrated Raspberry Pi 5, it functions right out of the box as a real-time RF camera.

You Use Wireless Signals. Now It’s Time to See Them

Using four coherent antennas, QuadRF measures differences in signal arrival time to render a live RF overlay directly on your phone or laptop at 30fps. Everyday objects—like Wi-Fi devices, wireless cameras, drones, beacons, and lab transmitters—become visible as radio sources with color-coded frequency.

An RF Tool for the Real World<br>Mount a smartphone on the mobile handle, align your camera, and you instantly have an augmented reality window into the world of radio waves.

Tap on an RF source, and you can instantly isolate it and pass the signal on to your SDR programs to decode, or transmit a beamformed signal right back. You can route signals to video decoders, two-way communication modems, GNU Radio flowgraphs, or your own custom applications running directly on the included Raspberry Pi 5.

QuadRF opens up new ways to interact with wireless systems. You can:

Visualize Radiation: Pinpoint the exact physical location of transmitters, hidden wireless cameras, or rogue access points through walls.

Observe the Environment: Watch RF reflections, and observe shadowing or absorption as people and materials move through the space.

Empower Robotics: Give machines a brand-new sensing modality with real-time spatial awareness of beacons and local RF infrastructure around it.

Communicate Long Range: Use beamforming to increase signal gain and reject interference for reliable two-way communication, even when either side of the link is moving. Perfect for locating and streaming HD video from multiple quadcopters.

Develop Mesh Networks: Build high-bandwidth wireless relays, both point-to-point and point-to-multipoint. With MIMO, you can transmit & receive from multiple nodes on the same frequency, at the same time.

Sense the Near-field: Transmit a probe signal to measure spatial responses, to characterize distance, absorption, reflection, material polarization effects, and general RF channels.

Test Antennas: Instantly compare how polarization or physical placement changes the RF field to intuitively debug your devices.

Enhance Education: Provide a practical, hands-on teaching tool for university students learning about MIMO, phased arrays, and spatial wireless measurements.

A Complete 4x4 MIMO SDR Kit<br>The QuadRF Kit delivers a complete, plug-and-play development platform. Getting started takes seconds: power it up, connect via Wi-Fi, Ethernet, or USB, and open the web interface (http://quadrf/) from your phone, tablet, or laptop.

We provide a microSD card preloaded with all drivers, libraries, and example applications—accessible directly from the desktop and released 100% open-source under GPLv2. The built-in Pi 5’s quad-core A76 processor easily handles control, the web GUI, real-time visualization, calibration, and most popular SDR applications locally.

Need more compute power? QuadRF can forward I/Q sample streams over Gigabit Ethernet, USB 3.0, or Wi-Fi using SoapySDR or ZeroMQ to heavy-duty programs on your laptop like Pothos, SDR#, or SDRangel.

The result is not just a cheaper SDR; it is a highly accessible entry point into the powerful world of coherent RF.

Start With Four Antennas. Scale To the Moon<br>A single QuadRF is a complete phased-array platform, but it is also designed to grow. We engineered QuadRF from the ground up to serve as the foundational building block for much larger phased arrays. Simply remove the RF board from your QuadRF case and mount it into our open-source interconnect structures.

This puts advanced programmable array technology into the hands of developers, educators, hardware hackers, and amateur radio enthusiasts. With an amateur radio license, you can build a 240-antenna array to bounce signals off the Moon (Earth-Moon-Earth communication), construct a backyard radio telescope to map the milky way in the C-band, develop long-range spatial mesh networks, communicate with Low-Earth Orbit satellites, or try out new mobile RF platforms.

Open hardware files enable custom experiments: new form factors, radomes, array concepts, and spatial RF applications we haven’t even thought of yet. QuadRF provides the building blocks to the phased array...