Legal & safety

Receive-only. The academy and its SDR stay RX only — nothing is ever transmitted. This matters: transmitting without a licence on most bands is illegal and can disrupt critical services.

A few principles (check your jurisdiction — this is not legal advice):

• Listening to the public spectrum is generally allowed. However, decoding, recording or disclosing the content of certain communications (telephony, private messages) is often forbidden, even if you can technically receive them.
• The ISM bands (433/868 MHz, 2.4 GHz) are meant for licence-free use — an ideal playground.
• Transmitting is another world: regulated, licensed (amateur radio, etc.). A HackRF is capable of it — don't, unless you know precisely what you're doing and where.

Hardware safety:

• Never feed a strong signal straight into the RX input (a nearby transmitter can damage the frontend).
• On some bands, add an attenuator or move away from strong sources.

Ethics. Drone detection and RF analysis belong in an authorised setting (your own gear, a site you're responsible for, an exercise). Privacy comes first.

In short: observe, learn, measure — passively, and by the book.