CESH 210 Unusual RF: Antennas, Hardware and Tooling

Bench Craft · 4 days · Assessed

About the course

This is the RF acquisition course. It teaches your people how to find, receive, measure and record signals properly before any serious analysis begins. The emphasis is not protocol reversing. It is the physical and measurement discipline needed to produce captures that can be trusted.

Students learn why poor RF work usually starts before the software: the wrong antenna, bad matching, poor cabling, overload, missing filtering, weak gain planning, or a capture chain that has never been verified. They build and tune antennas, work with feedlines, connectors, impedance and matching, calibrate and drive a vector network analyser, read S-parameters, and learn to tell a useful trace from a misleading one. They then apply the same discipline to SDR hardware, filters, low-noise amplifiers, attenuators, propagation and basic direction finding.

By the end, students can assemble a clean RF capture chain from antenna to SDR and prove that it is working. That makes this the foundation course for later signal analysis and radio protocol reverse engineering.

Want to know what to expect in the classroom? Find out more about our training approach and how we turn technical concepts into practical, hands-on skills.

Skills and topics covered

This list shows the various main topics we cover during the course:

Radiation hazards and legal constraints
RF receive-chain planning
Antenna selection, design and tuning
Feedlines, connectors and loss management
Impedance, matching and mismatch diagnosis
VNA calibration and S-parameter measurement
Antenna and cable fault finding
Gain, attenuation and overload control
Filtering and noise reduction in the capture chain
SDR front-end configuration and verification
Practical propagation and site effects
Producing trustworthy RF captures
Storage of captures and IQ format

What will a new trainee gain?

Your new entrants leave able to assemble and verify a working capture chain from antenna to SDR, the practical bottleneck that stops most newcomers before they ever decode a signal. For your organisation, that means a new hire who can set up reliable kit unsupervised and produce captures the rest of the team can actually use.

What will an experienced team member gain?

An experienced tester gains the measurement discipline to prove why a capture is poor instead of guessing at it, with a VNA and a properly matched chain rather than swapping parts and hoping. For your team, that shortens the maddening hours lost to noise and bad cabling, and makes RF results repeatable across people and sites.

Who this course is for

This course is for security professionals, RF practitioners and technical trainees who need to reliably find, receive and capture radio signals before moving into deeper analysis. Some basic familiarity with RF concepts is useful, but the course is designed to develop the practical hardware and measurement skills needed for later signal analysis and protocol reverse engineering.

Not sure where you fit? Find out more about our training audience and prerequisites.

Required equipment, tools, and software

You will need a laptop with at least 8GB RAM, preferably 16GB, an up-to-date and stable operating system, and an Ethernet port or reliable Ethernet dongle. Your laptop must be fully under your control so that you can install tools and dependencies and run arbitrary code.

It is useful to have the ability to run virtual machines. Any VMs provided during the course will be suitable for importing into VirtualBox; if you use a different hypervisor, you should be comfortable importing VMs from OVF file formats.

All specialist RF hardware, SDR equipment and other tools required for the practical exercises will be provided during the course. You do not need to bring any additional radio or analysis equipment.

We put together a goodie bag which directly relates to the activities in the course. The free goodie bag is yours to keep at the end of the course, just make sure you have enough luggage space to take it home. The exact details of what is in it will vary depending on availability but we always make it a useful and interesting collection. We provide any other tools needed to complete all the tasks set, aside from a laptop.

You don’t need to bring anything extra other than your enthusiasm!

Venue and travel information

The classroom

The classroom is well appointed, has good WiFi and hot and cold drinks, it’s spacious, comfortable, has plenty of power sockets, lots of natural light, and is wheelchair friendly. The course is delivered in English and digital versions of slides and handouts will be provided where appropriate.

Food and refreshments

Lunch and morning and afternoon snacks are provided so please make sure you let us know about any dietary needs at least a week before we get started. With the exception of the social night, all other meals are for you to organise. We suggest getting a hotel that provides breakfast, and there are many good restaurants in Manchester for your evening meals. We will try and facilitate additional social arrangements, but, this is down to the individuals present.

Staying in Manchester

There are a number of good and affordable hotels in the Manchester area. We are based in an area called Media City and we are in the same complex as the northern headquarters of the BBC. This means that there are lots of facilities locally and you could choose to not venture into the city centre.

Getting here

If you do choose to look further around there are good tram links that can take you into the city as well as to key travel hubs such as Piccadilly, the national railway station, and Manchester International Airport.

Please check the weather before you travel and bring suitable clothes for the season. If in doubt, assume you will need a waterproof coat and an umbrella. The locals will tell you that Manchester is one of the rainiest places in the world, its not actually true but it does drizzle more than you might expect, even in summer.

Ready to build a better RF capture chain?

Learn how to find, receive and record signals with confidence rather than leaving capture quality to chance. Over four days, you’ll work hands-on with antennas, VNAs, SDR hardware, filtering and gain to build, tune and verify RF capture chains that produce reliable results.

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