Features

Your HackRF (the board under the PortaPack) has the ability to send or receive radio waves in a broad frequency range. Some of its specs are:

• Transceiver: Half-duplex
• Operating frequency: 1 MHz to 6 GHz
• Supported sample rates: 2 to 20 Msps (quadrature)
• Resolution: 8 bits
• Max TX power (you can also check an empirical measurement):
  • 10 to 2150 MHz: 5 to 15 dBm, increasing as frequency decreases
  • 2150 to 2750 MHz: 13 to 15 dBm
  • 2750 to 4000 MHz: 0 to 5 dBm, increasing as frequency decreases
  • 4000 to 6000 MHz: -10 to 0 dBm, increasing as frequency decreases
• Max RX power: -5 dBm. Exceeding -5 dBm can result in permanent damage! Can safely accept up to 10 dBm with the front-end RX amplifier disabled
• CLKOUT/CLKIN: 10 MHz square wave (0V to 3V for a high impedance load)

From that list that might be confusing for the first user, we could extract few interesting points:

• Half-duplex: Means that it can send OR receive, but not send AND receive in a particular instant.
• Operating frequency: goes from 1 MHz to 6 GHz, that means that the device is able to send and receive signals from almost all the common sources you can imagine. You can see the range with more details here.