Ask HN: Has anyone hacked together their own ground-penetrating radar?

5 points

3 years ago

I spent this week at an archaeological excavation, and was surprised by how little technology is used. In particular, it seems like there’s no way to image underground before digging, to see if there’s structures, ceramics, or other artifacts worth digging for. Archaeologists usually stick to taking manual core samples.

This is in contrast to surface scanning, where off-the-shelf iPhone LIDAR scanning apps [1] are starting to take off.

I researched a bit and found a few off the shelf ground-penetrating radar scanners [2]. But these seem very expensive ($20k+).

These scanners seem to operate in the 400-800mhz range, which overlaps with the 802.11ah Wi-Fi range. At the same time, I’ve seen work that uses Wi-Fi to scan through walls [3]. It doesn’t seem too far a leap to repurpose this technology to see through the ground.

Has anyone tried hacking together a ground-penetrating radar using Wi-Fi routers, or other off-the-shelf components?

[1] https://poly.cam

[2] https://impulseradargpr.com/pinpointr/

[3] https://people.csail.mit.edu/fadel/wivi/

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