At the North-West University in South Africa Masters student SW Krüger submitted his dissertation titled “An inexpensive hyperbolic positioning system for tracking wildlife using off-the-shelf hardware” back in May of this year. Recently it was found online and can be viewed here (large pdf warning).

In his thesis Krüger explains his experiments with using RTL-SDR dongles to set up a very low cost wildlife monitoring system using TDOA (Time Difference of Arrival) techniques, and very low power beacons on the animal tags. TDOA is a difrection finding technique which involves using multiple receivers spread out over a region and calculating the difference in time from when the signal arrives at each receiver. With this information the position of the transmitter can be determined. Typically to do this the system clock in the computing hardware and OS needs to be synchronized as perfectly as possible between receivers, otherwise timing difference will cause huge errors in the position. Krüger uses synchronization bursts from a beacon, but notes that a real-time clock or GPS module could also be used for accurate time keeping.

In his experiment he set up two RTL-SDR receivers spaced 9 km apart and was able to obtain an accuracy of about 3.5m, which he writes is similar to other wildlife positioning systems that use tags with much higher power consumption. The computing hardware used at the RX station is a Raspberry Pi 3 powered by a 20W solar panel and batteries. There is also a wireless 3G modem for communications. The DSP software produced for the project is all open source and available on GitHub.