Call me Picasso

A fun one by @BusesCanfly! Challenge description says

"I sure do love painting :)"
(Note: sampled at 44.1 kHz) 

and has a gigantic mystery.zip file download. Inside the zip file is a file named thats_freq_ky.iq. iq files are radio captures stored in iq mode. Based on the title of the challenge, I did some quick google searching for “radio painting” and came across this hackaday article from 2015 about paint pictures with radio frequncies. So naturally, based on this information, we want to open it in a viewer for RF files. My weapon of choice for this challenge is HDSDR, but first we need to convert it into something the application can ingest. You can also use SDR# but I personally like using HDSDR more. Using iqToSharp I converted the iq file to a wav file to open in HDSDR using

iqToSharp_x64.exe -i .\thats_freq_ky.iq -f 44100 -o solve2.wav

At first glance we can see the following:

Certainly looks like they are “painting” on the airwaves! I basically sat through all three minutes of it looking for interesting spots like

Ultimately the flag ended up being near the end but we can clearly see that there is a flag!

Nestled in the same airwaves as John Hammond and Lord Foog we have our flag! Finally, I reversed the wav file to get things looking right side up for me to more easily clean things up using

sox -V solve.wav_44100Hz_IQ.wav solve_reverse.wav reverse

and there we have it!