There is so much free information out on the airwaves, if you only had the protocol docs available. In addition to the usual pseudo-voyeur stuff (police/fire/EMS/Burger King drive-thru radios), I've seen people downloading telemetry data from space probes, decoding GPS, tracking airplanes with ADS-B, and of course, bus timetables.
Yup, there's a huge number of protocols used for radio, too bad powerful software like Code300-32 still cost an eye. Tech specs are impressive, but still €4500 for the cheapest version. http://www.hoka.net/pdf/code300-32_spec.pdf
There are some FOSS demodulators out there, but unfortunately the number of protocols they support is way smaller. SigDigger however seems promising, although still in early stage of development.
https://batchdrake.github.io/SigDigger/
> people downloading telemetry data from space probes
Monitoring JWST transmissions, if doable, might be the next milestone for Ham Radio.
Already done by multipke people at the level of seeing the carrier.
No data decoded as that needs much larger dishes.
People have also been able to receive the carrier of various space probes orbiting Mars.
Kelso : It comes to you, this stuff just flies through the air, they send this information "beamed" out over the fucking place, you just got to know how to grab it, see, I know how to grab it.
Somewhat related, SFMTA Muni is retiring its current bus stop displays because of AT&T 3G decommissioning. Probably not worth the effort, but presumably sufficiently motivated people could spoof legacy 3G and feed it any data they wish.
