A Paper on Clock Distribution for Phase Coherent Operation of RTL-SDR Receivers

Modifying RTL-SDR dongles to run from the same clock source to create a phase-coherent receiver is something that has been done for many years. The original experiments from 2015 by Tatu Peltola and others are what inspired the creation of the KerberosSDR and KrakenSDR coherent RTL-SDR radio systems for radio direction finding.

Recently, Mykhailo Shumilov, an independent researcher in Ukraine, wrote a paper on running RTL-SDR dongles from the same clock, which may be of interest to those working on coherence experiments. In his experiments, he uses an Si5351A as the reference clock and two RTL-SDR dongles. While his paper doesn't cover any new ground, he presents concrete measurements confirming the phase coherence-stabilizing effect of running two RTL-SDR dongles from the same clock. 

AI-Disclaimer: The paper author notes that AI was used to aid in the writing of the paper.

Running two RTL-SDR dongles from a shared clock for phase coherence
Running two RTL-SDR dongles from a shared clock for phase coherence
Tweet
Share
Reddit
Vote
Email

Related posts:

  1. QIRX SDR: Experimenting with Phase-Coherent RTL-SDRs
  2. Sparse Array Beamforming with a Phase Coherent 21-Channel RTL-SDR Array
  3. An RTL-SDR Phase Correlative Direction Finder
  4. A Multi-Channel Coherent RTL-SDR Product: For Passive Radar, Direction Finding and More
  5. RTL-SDR Based Coherent Multichannel Receiver
Subscribe
Notify of
guest

1 Comment
Justin
#273460

Paper discusses using 2 receivers with common clock. Reproduced the results using a second pair of receivers. Unclear to me if this method could be used to create an arbitrary NxM array of receivers. What would scaling limits be?

0
Reply