More Information on The Android RTL-SDR Direction Finding Implementation

Last week we posted about some interesting conference talk videos from GNU Radio Con 17. One of the videos was a talk by Sam Whiting who in conjunction with colleagues Dana Sorensen and Todd Moon from Utah State University have created an Android app that uses two coherent RTL-SDR dongles for direction finding. A coherent RTL-SDR can be created simply by removing the clock on one RTL-SDR and connecting the clock from another, so that they both share the same clock. The V3 RTL-SDR has a clock selector header which can be used to facilitate this as well.

Over on his YouTube account Sam Whiting has uploaded two videos showing the app in action. The backend GNU Radio code for direction analysis is available on GitHub, but unfortunately the Android code/apk is not available to the public as the code is owned by the funders of the project.

In the videos the app shows two arrows, one of which points towards the source of a transmission at a frequency that is being monitored. The second arrow is simply there due to the direction ambiguity produced by the methods used.

The GRCon17 presentation video can be found here, and the slides here.