KerberosSDR Preview: A 4x Coherent RTL-SDR for Direction Finding, Passive Radar and more

KerberosSDR is now available for pre-order over on Indiegogo!

Over the last few months we've been working on a 4-input coherent RTL-SDR called 'KerberosSDR' (formerly known as HydraSDR) that is designed to be a low cost way to get into applications such as RF direction finding, passive radar, beam forming and more. It can also be used as a standard 4-channel SDR for monitoring multiple frequencies as well.

Phase coherent RTL-SDRs have been worked on and demonstrated several times over the past few years, but we've been disappointed to find that so far there hasn't been any easy way to replicate these experiments. The required hardware has been difficult to build and access, and the software has been kept as unreleased closed source or has been too complicated to install and use. With KerberosSDR we aim to change that by making phase coherent applications easier to access and run by providing ready to use hardware and software.

Thanks to our developer Tamás Peto, a PhD student at Budapest University of Technology and Economics whom we hired via the ad in our previous post, and the Othernet (formerly Outernet) engineering team who are our partners on this project, we've been able to build a working system, and demonstrate coherent direction finding and passive radar working as expected (demo videos below). We plan to eventually release Tamás' code as open source so that the entire community can benefit and build on it. Also if KerberosSDR turns a profit, we plan to reinvest some of the profits into continually improving the software and expanding the list of use cases.

KerberosSDR will be usable for coherent applications from ~80-100 MHz up to 1.7 GHz (as a standard receiver it will work down to 24 MHz like a regular RTL-SDR). The lower coherent limitation is due to the phase calibration board, and could be improved by custom creating a larger calibration PCB.

At the moment we are finalizing our prototype, and plan to begin final production within the next 2-3 months.

If you have any interest in KerberosSDR, please sign up to our Kerberos mailing list. 

Direction Finding

KerberosSDR can be used to find the bearing towards a signal using it's coherent direction finding capabilities. The software by Tamás currently implements several direction finding algorithms such as Bartlett, Capon, Maximum Entropy (MEM) and MUSIC. In the video below we show a quick test of the direction finding system working with a HackRF being used as a signal source, and four dipole antennas connected to KerberosSDR in a linear array. The MUSIC algorithm is used.

In the image below we also attempted to find the direction towards a known TETRA transmitter. We were able to confirm the direction with an Android compass app that points towards the known transmitter location. As the two angles match, we can be confident that Kerberos is finding the correct direction to the transmitter.

Passive Radar

KerberosSDR can also be used for passive radar. Normal radar systems work by transmitting a pulse of RF energy, and listening to the reflections from objects like planes, cars and ships. Passive radar works by using already existing transmitters such as those for FM/TV and listening for reflections that bounce of objects.

With a simple passive radar system you need two directional antennas and two coherent receivers. One antenna points at the transmitting 'reference' tower, and the other at the 'surveillance' area where you want to listen for reflections. It's important to try and keep as much of the reference signal out of the surveillance antenna as possible, which is why directional antennas like Yagi's are used.

The result is a doppler vs time delay graph, where the reflection of aircraft, cars, ships and other objects can be seen. The doppler gives you the speed of the object relative to your antenna and the transmitting tower, and the time delay gives you the distance relative to your antenna and the transmitter tower.

Below is an example time lapse video of KerberosSDR being used for passive radar. The reference antenna points towards a DVB-T transmitter at 588 MHz, and the surveillance antenna overlooks a small neighborhood, with aircraft sometimes flying over. The antennas we used were two very cheap TV Yagis.

You can constantly see the reflections from vehicles at small doppler values (low speeds), and every now and then you see an aircraft reflection which shows up at much higher doppler (speed) and further time delay (distance) points. 

More information about KerberosSDR

KerberosSDR includes:

• 4x Coherent R820T2 based RTL-SDR dongles with standard 24 MHz - 1.7 GHz frequency range
• On board GPIO switched wide band noise source for sample sync and phase calibration
• Special phase calibration PCB for 4x inputs. Required to make the Kerberos phase coherent.
• On board USB Hub, so only one USB port is required on the PC
• Shielded metal enclosure

KerberosSDR can also be extended to 8x receivers by daisy chaining two boards together, so that their clocks and noise sources are connected. We've also taken into account undesirable effects such as heat related PLL drift which can be an issue for phase coherence.

At the moment we are also investigating whether singleboard computers like the Raspberry Pi 3 or Tinkerboard can be used, and there will be a header available for powering them via the Kerberos PCB. In the future we also plan to work on optimizing the code and potentially using CUDA/OpenCL GPU optimizations for passive radar so everything runs smoothly.

Once released we plan to have extensive tutorials and documentation that show exactly how to set up and replicate direction finding and passive radar experiments with low cost antennas.

Screenshots of KerberosSDR software:

Remember, if you're interested please sign up to the KerberosSDR mailing list for announcements and the chance to get in early with the cheaper first 100 units.

Be on the look out for more interesting demos that will be posted in the coming weeks!

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Update: Please note that due to a Trademark complaint, we have changed the name of this unit from HydraSDR to KerberosSDR.

KerberosSDR Updates: 27 August 18

This week we've managed to get the KerberosSDR demo software made by Tamás Peto functioning on a TinkerBoard. The TinkerBoard is a US$60 single board computer. It's similar to a Raspberry Pi 3, but more powerful. We've also tested the app running on the Raspberry Pi 3 and Odroid XU4. The Pi 3 is capable of running the software but it is a little slow, and the Odroid XU4 is a little faster than the TinkerBoard. In the future we hope to further optimize the code so even Raspberry Pi 3's will be smooth.

In the video below we used a circular array of four whip antennas connected to KerberosSDR. The TinkerBoard is connected to KerberosSDR and is set up to generate a WiFi hotspot, which we connect to with an Android phone and a Windows laptop. The Windows laptop connects to the TinkerBoard's desktop via VNC, and the Android phone receives an HTML/JavaScript based compass display via an Apache server running on the Tinkerboard. With this setup we can wirelessly control and view information from KerberosSDR and the TinkerBoard.

We've also tested the KerberosSDR system on a real signal, and have found it to work as expected. More demo's of that coming later.

For more info on KerberosSDR please see our previous announcement post.

KerberosSDR Updates: 4 September 2018

In this post we'll show an experiment that we performed which was to pinpoint the location of a transmitter using KerberosSDR's coherent direction finding capabilities. RF direction finding is the art of using equipment to determine the location of a transmitting signal. The simplest way is by using a directional antenna like a Yagi to try and determine the bearing based on signal strength. Another method is using a pseudo-doppler or coherent array of antennas to determine a bearing based on phase information.

For the test we tuned the KerberosSDR RTL-SDRs to listen to a signal at 858 MHz and then drove to multiple locations to take direction readings. The antennas were set up as a linear array of four dipole antennas mounted on the windshield of a car. To save space, the dipoles were spaced at approximately a 1/3 the frequency wavelength, but we note that optimal spacing is at half a wavelength. The four dipole antennas were connected to KerberosSDR, with a laptop running the direction finding demo software. 

Our open source demo software (to be released later when KerberosSDR ships) developed by Tamás Peto gives us a graph and compass display that shows the measured bearing towards the transmitter location. The measured bearing is relative to the antenna array, so we simply convert it by taking the difference between the car's bearing (determined approximately via road direction and landmarks in Google Earth) and the measured bearing. This hopefully results in a line crossing near to the transmitter. Multiple readings taken at different locations will end up intersecting, and where the intersection occurs is near to where the transmitter should be. 

In the image below you can see the five bearing measurements that we made with KerberosSDR. Four lines converge to the vicinity of the transmitter, and one diverges. The divergent reading can be explained by multipath. In that location the direct path to the transmitter was blocked by a large house and trees, so it probably detected the signal as coming in from the direction of a reflection. But regardless with four good readings it was possible to pinpoint the transmitting tower to within 400 meters.

In the future we hope to be able to automate this process by using GPS and/or e-compass data to automatically draw bearings on a map as the car moves around. The readings could also be combined with signal strength heatmap data for improved accuracy.

This sort of capability could be useful for finding the transmit location of a mystery signal, locating a lost beacon, locating pirate or interfering transmitters, determining a source of noise and more.

KerberosSDR Updates 7 September 2018

For this test we parked our car to the side of a highway and pointed a cheap DVB-T Yagi antenna towards a DVB-T transmission tower, and another cheap Yagi down the road. The video shown below displays the results captured over a 5 minute period. The blips on the top half of the display indicate vehicles closing on our location (positive doppler shift), and the blips on the bottom half indicate objects moving away (negative doppler shift). 

The resolution of each individual vehicle is not great, but it is sufficient to see the overall speed of the highway and could be used to determine if a road is experiencing traffic slowdowns or not. When larger vehicles pass by it is also obvious on the display by the brighter blip that they show. The display also shows us that the highway direction coming towards us is much busier than the direction moving away.

In the future we'll be working on optimizing the code so that the display updates much faster and smoother. It may also be possible in the future to use the third and fourth tuners to obtain even greater object resolution.

KerberosSDR Updates 27 September 2018

In this post we're showing some more passive radar demos. The first video is a time lapse of aircraft coming in to land at a nearby airport. The setup consists of two DVB-T Yagi antennas, with KerberosSDR tuned to a DVB-T signal at 584 MHz. The reference antenna points towards a TV tower to the west, and the surveillance antenna points south. Two highlighted lines indicate roughly where reflections can be seen from within the beam width (not taking into account blockages from mountains, trees etc).

The second video shows a short time lapse of a circling helicopter captured by the passive radar. The helicopter did not show up on ADS-B. On the left are reflections from cars and in the middle you can see the helicopter's reflection moving around.

We are expecting to receive the final prototype of KerberosSDR within the next few weeks. If all is well we may begin taking pre-orders shortly after confirming the prototype.