The April 2026 recipient for the Great Scott Gadgets Free Stuff Program is Juan Tejeda, applying on behalf of The Diplomatura en Ciberseguridad at UNTREF (Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero), an academic graduate program focused on training cybersecurity professionals in Argentina. We have sent the group a HackRF One to use in their program’s curriculum. Students will use HackRF One to understand radio frequency fundamentals and signal processing, analyze and reverse-engineer wireless protocols used in critical infrastructure and IoT devices, conduct ethical penetration testing on wireless networks, demonstrate vulnerabilities in wireless communications and help students understand real-world attack vectors. The Diplomatura en Ciberseguridad is an educational program serving 30+ students per cohort. The device will be a permanent asset in their laboratory, providing hands-on experience that cannot be gained through simulations alone. They emphasize practical, ethical hacking methodologies aligned with industry standards. HackRF One’s capabilities make it ideal for teaching advanced frequency analysis, modulation techniques, and spectrum monitoring essential for modern cybersecurity professionals. All student work will be documented in an open-source lab repository, contributing to the broader educational cybersecurity community. We wish these students the best on their educational journey and are looking forward to seeing the work contributed to their repository!

The March 2026 recipient for the Great Scott Gadgets Free Stuff Program is Ramon Gallinad Corti, a final-year Telecommunications Engineering student from Spain. Ramon has a background in signal processing and SDR and has proposed a project he calls RF-Learn, an open source educational repository and YouTube video series in Spanish. RF-Learn will be structured in three progressive modules. The first will cover satellite signal reception: decoding NOAA weather satellite imagery, tracking aircraft via ADS-B, and visualizing signal propagation — all with full GNU Radio flow graphs published to the repository. The second module will focus on RF protocol analysis of common consumer devices, such as wireless sensors, remote controls, and ISM-band IoT devices, documenting how these signals are structured and how to decode them. The third module will cover responsible security demonstrations: controlled replay attack scenarios, signal capture and analysis, and discussion of real-world implications for wireless protocol design — always in a legal, controlled environment and framed around defensive awareness. Each experiment will be accompanied by documented GNU Radio flow graphs, Python scripts, and written explanations in the repository, all under MIT license. Videos will walk through the theory, the setup, and the results in accessible Spanish, targeting engineering students who want hands-on RF experience beyond what their curriculum provides. Ramon’s main goal through this project is to bridge the gap between English-language SDR content and the Spanish-speaking engineering student population worldwide. While excellent English-language SDR content exists, high-quality, technically rigorous SDR educational material in Spanish is scarce. We are happy to supply Ramon with a HackRF One to help him develop his project further and are looking forward to seeing the content he creates!

The February 2026 recipient for the Great Scott Gadgets Free Stuff Program is David Wagner on behalf of the TU Wien Space Team, a collective of 100 students in Austria at the Vienna University of Technology. SpaceTeamSat1 (STS1) is the current CubeSat mission, which aims to develop a 1U CubeSat for educational purposes and operate it in orbit. In addition, a dedicated ground station is operated for communication with the CubeSat. Students in Austria will have the opportunity to run self-developed software on the satellite’s education payload. The payload of the CubeSat “STS1” consists of a Raspberry Pi to which various sensors and cameras are connected. With access to the sensors and cameras, students can take measurements, images and videos. Once the code has been successfully validated on the ground, it is transmitted via RF communication to the CubeSat “STS1”, which executes the code and transmits the results of the experiments back to the ground station. From there, the (processed) data is handed over to the students. The data can then be analyzed, interpreted and presented in the final step. Through this project, student teams get to know the entire process of space data communication. A Mission Control Center will be set up at the TU Wien Space Team HQ, which will then display the current status data of, position of, and more information about the CubeSat. We have contributed a HackRF One to the team’s efforts as we were impressed by their progress so far and their dedication to achieving their goals by means of open source software and hardware.

At Great Scott Gadgets, we do not accept contributions that are assisted by or generated using LLMs. That is because we believe open source is about more than producing code. It is a community practice built around participation, shared understanding, public learning, and stewardship of a commons. Projects like HackRF and Cynthion exist and have longevity because communities have formed around them over many years. People have contributed code, reviewed pull requests, filed issues, improved documentation, answered questions, taught workshops, written tutorials, produced videos, and helped each other learn. The community IS the project. The open source code, designs, and even the hardware we sell are just the artifacts it produces.

Folks who participate in open source communities and contribute to projects not only help the projects grow, but can also gain domain knowledge, learn best practices, prove skills that employers find valuable, and develop relationships. In fact, some of the people who contributed to Great Scott Gadgets’ projects eventually joined our team. Dominic Spill began as a collaborator on Ubertooth and later worked with Great Scott Gadgets for many years. Mike Walters contributed to the HackRF project long before we hired him because it was open and accessible from the beginning. Those opportunities existed because of the collaboration that was happening in public. LLMs, by contrast, allow people to obtain code and explanations without necessarily participating in the conversations, review processes, and collaborative learning that help sustain those projects.

Advocates of vibe coding tools often argue that they lower barriers to entry by enabling users to do things they otherwise couldn’t, but whether they actually do so is debatable. In many cases, they simply replace skill barriers with dependence on proprietary services, while users of these services often trade full community participation and all its benefits for interactions mediated by LLMs trained on community-built open source projects. Our communities are already noticing a shift away from collaborative stewardship and toward transactional interactions with projects, and we’re seeing open source project maintainers left to deal with increasing volumes of generated code. When people interact privately with systems trained on communities, it gradually weakens the shared understanding of how projects work and redistributes the burden more heavily onto (often underfunded) project owners. Open source projects don’t need more code for its own sake; they need contributors who can understand the code they submit and help maintain their work over time.

We have seen increasing pressure on maintainers to simply accept that LLM-generated development is inevitable, and we reject that framing. We reject it because the thing we value most about open source is community. We want you to participate, even if you are new. We want you to read the code and documentation, ask your questions publicly, and help others. We want contributors to develop understanding through engagement with projects and with each other.

There are also project licensing considerations at play when we think about accepting contributions. Questions of authorship, attribution, and provenance are relevant to the licenses we use, such as BSD and CERN-OHL, and LLM-generated contributions can make those questions significantly fuzzier. But for us, the potential legal issues (like unresolved questions surrounding AI-generated content and copyright) are secondary to the trust issue. People and organizations use open source hardware and software because they want systems they can inspect, reproduce, modify, and depend on long-term. Open source ecosystems are strongest when people understand where code, designs, and documentation come from and who is responsible for them. When authorship and derivation become unclear, that trust can erode.

We also have serious concerns about other aspects of LLM systems, including but not limited to the environmental costs of data centers, the concentration of power in the hands of a small number of big tech companies, the treatment of workers whose labor is used to train them, and the risk of de-skilling. We don’t use LLMs internally, either. Those concerns are important, but the focus of this post is community. Open source projects succeed because people learn and create best together, and we do not want to see community-built ecosystems replaced by extractive development environments optimized for output volume rather than shared understanding. If it’s worth doing, it’s worth our full participation.

The January 2026 recipient for the Great Scott Gadgets Free Stuff Program is Hank Fordham, a cybersecurity specialist and public speaker from Alberta, Canada! Hank, better known online as “Hank the Hacker” delivers live hacking demonstrations at conferences, higher education institutions, CTF competitions, and public sector events. We have sent Hank a HackRF One and YARD Stick One to use as core components of these demonstrations at upcoming conferences this year. He tells us that his presentations focus on demystifying wireless attacks by showing audiences how real-world RF threats work in practice. Rather than relying solely on slides, he builds controlled, responsible live demos that visualize and explain attack techniques such as sub-GHz replay attacks, insecure remote control protocols, legacy IoT communications, and signal analysis fundamentals. Hank says that with HackRF One, he will be able to perform real-time spectrum visualization and modulation demonstrations, helping audiences see how signals occupy and move across frequency space. The YARD Stick One will be used to demonstrate sub-GHz protocol weaknesses in a safe, controlled environment - never targeting real-world systems but displaying how improperly implemented rolling codes, static identifiers, or unencrypted transmissions can be captured and replayed. This is especially impactful when teaching non-RF specialists, such as IT leaders, students, and defenders, who often understand TCP/IP security but have little exposure to RF-layer threats. Hank’s ultimate goal is to highlight and raise awareness of modern cybersecurity threats and promote responsible defensive research. We are glad we were able to support Hank’s endeavors and wish him luck at his events this year!

The December 2025 recipient for the Great Scott Gadgets Free Stuff Program is Nikos Gerogiannakis, applying on behalf of the Epictetus Wireless Security & Signal Research Initiative at the Hellenic Mediterranean University. Nikos says that their group has established a solid foundation in digital signal analysis and embedded security through hands-on projects such as an FPGA-based logic analyzer and Smart Locker systems. With the HackRF One we have sent their way, the group plans to proactively audit systems like their RFID scanners, probing for real-world vulnerabilities such as signal replay to develop genuinely robust, open-source access controls. They also plan to incorporate software-defined radio into their hands-on certification program and foster an environment where students can safely explore the security implications of the wireless protocols that surround them, turning theoretical risks into tangible, understandable lessons. We wish Nikos and their team well on their educational journey and are excited to hear about their academic accomplishments!

Since HackRF Pro began shipping at the end of 2025, we have become aware of an ongoing issue with USB connectors on some units received by customers. Our engineering team has investigated further and discovered that the connector manufacturer changed tooling between our prototypes and full production, resulting in less reliable ground/shield contact. The next production round has started and we have corrected the issue by using a replacement part, so this issue should only affect units from the r1.2.1-p1 round.

If your HackRF Pro tends to lose USB connectivity easily when the USB cable is touched, first try a different cable. In many cases, unreliability is caused by the cable or by a combination of cable and connector. If the issue persists, you may want to try the relatively simple self-repair described below!

First, remove the lid from your HackRF Pro enclosure - if you haven’t done this before, we suggest taking a look at this video from Jared Boone. HackRF Pro’s case is a little easier to open than HackRF One’s and can typically be opened without tools.

Next, bend the connector’s external shell contacts inward with a small tool, such as a miniature screwdriver.

Exchanging units through the reseller you purchased your HackRF Pro from is also an option, but we cannot guarantee the new unit won’t have the same issue, since it could be from the same production run as the faulty one. If you are still interested in receiving a new unit, please contact the reseller you purchased your HackRF Pro from.

If you still have questions, are seeking advice, or would just like to join in on HackRF Pro and Great Scott Gadgets related discussion, we encourage you to join our Discord server!

The belated November 2025 recipient for the Great Scott Gadgets Free Stuff Program is Srajan Sonkesriya from India! Srajan is currently working on an open source project where he is turning an Android device (Realme 5 Pro, RMX1971) into a portable RF experimentation and learning platform. His goal is to show that a smartphone, when paired with a properly customized kernel and open-source tools, can function as a compact RF workstation for students and beginners who cannot afford other common equipment. He says that so far, he has successfully built a custom kernel for Android 16 and added multiple patches to support external Wi-Fi adapters, improved USB peripherals, enhanced debugging options, and prepared the system for integration with SDR devices. He is now working on additional wireless-related patches, including research into frame injection support and improving compatibility across various external radios. Once the kernel environment is stable and fully documented, his next project is to build a small, phone-controlled system for satellite signal tracking and visualization. He aims to create Android-friendly scripts, tutorials, and tooling that allow users to receive, demodulate, and interpret low-Earth-orbit satellite signals directly from a mobile device. This will be released publicly so anyone with limited hardware can experiment and learn. Srajan’s ultimate purpose is education-focused and is to create a low-cost, open-source RF learning platform powered by an Android phone, so that more students—especially those without access to laptops—can explore wireless and SDR topics. We have sent Srajan a HackRF One to assist him in his development and are happy to help someone who is focused on education and community impact!

The belated October 2025 recipient for the Great Scott Gadgets Free Stuff Program is Alex Barnes, who applied on behalf of Amateur Radio and Electronics Society (QUB_ARES) at Queen’s University Belfast! Alex has informed us that they are an academic society primarily focused on running regular educational events around radio and electronics. So far they have run lessons and training for their members to get UK Foundation Amateur Radio licenses, worked with a local Scouts group for Jamborees on the Air, and she ran a series of events last year where she demonstrated using an SDR and a few 433 MHz ASK modules to reverse engineer the protocol used by wireless doorbells. The society has deep roots within the history of Queen’s University Belfast, although for most of the past 25 years it was non-existent! Alex tells us that students restarted the society almost two years ago, and are still trying to acquire equipment for them to use for events. We sent the Amateur Radio and Electronics Society a HackRF One, which they plan on using for future educational events, including more amateur radio license training and demonstrations that will be hands-on and allow participants to go on the air. We are looking forward to seeing what the members of ARES are able to accomplish with their new HackRF One!

The belated September 2025 recipient for the Great Scott Gadgets Free Stuff Program is Ashen Chathuranga, a university student from Sri Lanka. He is working on a project involving the development of an open source satellite monitoring station and requested a HackRF One to conduct his research. He will also be researching radio wave penetrating materials for his university. Being able to assist students in need of equipment for academic research and goals is one of our primary goals for our Free Stuff Program, so we are happy we were able to help Ashen out!