The w1700k-sdr project takes a Gemtek W1700K Wi-Fi 7 router — commodity hardware retailing for under $100 — and turns it into a wideband software-defined radio receiver capable of capturing 320 million samples per second of 14-bit complex IQ data across the 2.4, 5, and 6 GHz bands. The entire 2.4 GHz band, rendered as a live 262,144-point FFT waterfall at 100 frames per second in a browser. That is a capability that, until now, required dedicated SDR hardware costing thousands. The technical achievement here is the firmware. The team wrote their own from scratch — ROM patch, WM (radio bring-up), and WA (packer) — decoded register by register from traces of MediaTek's proprietary firmware. No MediaTek code ships. The firmware brings the MT7996 radio up from cold power-on, handles LO synthesis with 2.98 Hz resolution on the 2.4 GHz band, and manages gain, filtering, and sample-rate selection entirely through their own command interface. The radio's tuning is continuous — no channel abstraction, just raw synthesizer frequency in Hz — retunable mid-stream in about 1 millisecond. The data path is equally impressive. The MT7996 DMAs samples into a 1 GiB ring buffer in the AN7581 SoC's DRAM. A custom kernel module sends each 8 KiB slice as a UDP datagram over the router's 10 GbE port, zero-copy. At 320 Msps the link saturates near 10 Gbit/s, so half the slices get losslessly packed to 28 bits per sample pair on the radio's own RISC-V cores. On the host side, a stream service exposes the IQ data via shared memory to any consumer, with optional roll-off correction applied to the samples themselves. The generative implications are significant. This democratizes wideband RF observation — spectrum monitoring, interference hunting, signal analysis, radio astronomy experimentation — using hardware that is mass-produced, cheap, and widely available. The 2.4-to-7.5 GHz tuning range covers Wi-Fi, cellular, ISM, and satellite bands. The 320 MHz instantaneous bandwidth with 14-bit resolution competes with lab-grade instruments. And the entire stack is MIT/GPL-licensed, buildable from public sources in ten minutes. There are real constraints. The firmware is receive-only — no transmit calibrations are run, the MAC transmit path stays disabled. Installation replaces the stock OS and requires a serial console and NAND backup. The 10 GbE requirement means you need a proper NIC on the host. And the project warns explicitly about undocumented register hazards that can hang the SoC. This is not a consumer product; it is a power tool for people who know what IQ samples are and what to do with them. The licensing and build posture matter. No vendor blobs are downloaded or needed. The register reference headers document every known MT7996, A-die, and AN7581 register. The architecture and roadmap are published. This is the kind of project that creates institutional knowledge about proprietary silicon — knowledge that outlasts any single product cycle and feeds the next generation of open radio work. The broader signal: commodity Wi-Fi 7 silicon is powerful enough to serve as a general-purpose wideband SDR platform, if someone does the firmware work. That someone now exists, and the work is public.
