RTL-SDR Based Passive Aircraft Radar

Over on YouTube we’ve discovered a video from earlier in the year showing the RTL-SDR being used as a passive aircraft radar. This is different to ADS-B which is a type of active radar. A passive radar works by using a very strong radio signal from a readily available source such as a TV or FM radio transmitter and detecting the reflections from aircraft.

A RTL-SDR based passive radar system can be built by connecting two RTL-SDR dongles to a single clock source and by using two directional antennas.

We’ve also posted about RTL-SDR based passive radar being used to track aircraft here and here in the past. Another post about coherent multichannel RTL-SDR receivers can be found here.

8 comments

  1. no

    i am pissed. why does nobody say how everyone can make something like that?!
    Its nice to glue some dongle together and than? I found no Software, Howto or something else to do that.

Post a comment

You may use the following HTML:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>