WiFi 7 Router Repurposed as 320 Msps SDR Receiver
Original: Turn a WiFi 7 Router into a 320Msps Software Defined Radio Receiver
Why This Matters
Turns commodity WiFi hardware into high-bandwidth SDR gear, lowering entry cost significantly.
Developer h0m3us3r has open-sourced firmware that turns a Gemtek W1700K WiFi 7 router into a wideband SDR receiver, streaming 14-bit IQ samples at up to 320 Msps over 10 GbE to a browser-based spectrum analyzer.
A GitHub project called w1700k-sdr repurposes a Gemtek W1700K WiFi 7 router—built around MediaTek's MT7996 radio chip and Airoha AN7581 SoC—into a capable software-defined radio receiver. The hack captures raw 14-bit IQ samples at 40, 80, 160, or 320 Msps across the 2.4 GHz band, then streams the data over the router's 10 GbE port to a Linux host displaying a live spectrum and waterfall in the browser.
Notably, the MT7996 runs entirely custom firmware: a ROM patch plus WM and WA components built from the repository, with no MediaTek binary blobs. The team reverse-engineered MediaTek's initialization and calibration routines register by register from firmware traces, giving the host full control over LO frequency, sample rate, gain, filtering, and capture. A 262,144-point FFT is computed on every sample, delivering 100 spectra per second. Decimation roll-off is corrected in-stream via a "flatten" feature. The project already has 445 stars and 44 forks after just 9 commits, signaling strong interest from the SDR and radio hacking community.