Portable Raspberry Pi tactical Software Defines Radio doubles as a drone jammer

What makes a Raspberry Pi project tactical? Maker and developer Media-Grizzly has their own ideas with this cool, portable Pi-powered software-defined radio (SDR) system they built from scratch dubbed the D.E.S.E.R.T Pi-Powered Tactical System. Not only does it work as a handy SDR on the go, it doubles as a drone jammer that can disable nearby drones with the flip of a switch. It’s got a handful of features with plenty of room for modification in the future.

Media-Grizzly’s D.E.S.E.R.T Pi-Powered Tactical System is housed in a portable case with a decent selection of hardware to play around with. We don’t have a full build list yet but we can see a nice, laser-engraved faceplate encompassing a keyboard, power LED, USB port, and an LCD display in the middle. However, the most tempting input of all is the big red switch in the corner labeled “DE-AUTH”.

According to Media-Grizzly’s, this DE-AUTH switch is programmed to interact specifically with drone signals. It’s important to note that the legality of such interference can vary greatly depending on where you live and Media-Grizzly assures this is a theoretical use case. That said, the drone jammer would work by connecting an antenna and arming the switch. Any drone within range of the antenna will lose its signal while activated.

The D.E.S.E.R.T Pi-Powered Tactical System is powered by a Raspberry Pi 4B but Media-Grizzly assures it’s compatibility with anything from a Pi Zero up to a Raspberry Pi 4B but you could probably get a Pi 5 working with a little extra effort. It’s powered by a 12V battery back and uses a 5V buck converter. The Pi itself draws around 5 Watts while the whole system draws around 17 Watts. Media-Grizzly has plans to add an Adafruit INA219 to monitor the power usage on the screen in real time.

As of writing, no source code has been shared for the project. However, Media-Grizzly stated in the project thread that they have plans to share the code he put together for the D.E.S.E.R.T Pi-Powered Tactical System and will post it to a GitHub page in the near future. Be sure to follow them for future updates if you’re interested in how it works.

If you want to get a closer look at this Raspberry Pi project, you can check it out over Reddit where Media-Grizzly has shared some additional details.