KerberosSDR Tracking a Drone Carrying an FM Beacon

KerberosSDR is our 4-channel phase coherent capable RTL-SDR unit that we previously successfully crowdfunded back in 2018.  With a 4-channel phase coherent RTL-SDR interesting applications like radio direction finding, passive radar and beam forming become possible. It can also be used as 4 separate RTL-SDRs for multichannel monitoring. KerberosSDR is currently in stock and available on the Othernet store.

Recently Zuokun Li et al from the University of East China Normal University published an open access conference paper that documents their results at using a KerberosSDR to track a drone. As typical drone control frequencies at 2.4 GHz are outside the range of the RTL-SDRs used on the KerberosSDR, they carried a 446 MHz FM beacon on the drone.

In their experiment they set up both circular and linear antenna arrays for the KerberosSDR, then flew the drone in front of the antenna array while recording the bearings calculated by the KerberosSDR system. The results showed that the KerberosSDR was able to successfully track the drone's bearing with either antenna array, however the linear array produced more accurate results as expected.

We note that a linear array cannot differentiate if an object is in front or behind the array. However, if this knowledge is known it can be used instead of a circular array to get more accurate bearings that are less affected by multipath.

If you're interested in this, you might also like our articles on using a KerberosSDR to track a weather balloon, to locate a P25 transmitter, or our Android app in car demos.