Tracking Wildlife in South Africa with RTL-SDR And An Android App
Thank you to Gary Schneider from workingwithwildlife.org for writing in and submitting news about the release of his Android App called "SDR Direction Finder (RTL-SDR)" which currently costs US$9.99. Gary is a wildlife conservationist who has been using RTL-SDRs and his Android app to track animal beacons in the wild. Gary writes his story best:
I run a conservation project in South Africa conducting wildlife monitoring, and I’ve spent the past 7 years out in the field tracking wildlife. To make tracking more practical and affordable for researchers and NGOs, I’ve spent much of my time outside of fieldwork developing an Android app to replace traditional receivers, and I’ve recently published it on the Google Play Store.
While other apps exist, I’ve found them practically too difficult to use in field conditions and very limited in range. My focus was maximizing VHF range while keeping the interface simple.
By using the app’s custom IQ filter settings with an RTL-SDR V3 and LNA combo, my old spare Xiaomi phone now outperforms my $1,200 Comm Spec R-5000 receiver. The most challenging part of development was optimising the high-resolution waterfall to run smoothly at a high sample rate without any stuttering on low-end devices.
I added a built-in mapping feature to log bearings and automatically calculate estimated signal locations. The map also allows users to import their own custom KML/KMZ files. This has been incredibly helpful for me to quickly locate my tracked animals, and to subsequently export my data for further analysis. The waterfall makes it easy to handle signal drift or monitor multiple collars simultaneously (e.g. when I’m searching for a pack of African wild dogs which might have two or three working VHF collars fitted).
While wildlife tracking here is exclusively CW in the 148–152 MHz range, the app isn't limited to this. It also supports AM, NFM, WFM (Mono/Stereo), LSB, and USB across the full range.
Even though I developed this with wildlife tracking in mind, it should work equally well for falconry, fox hunting, or simply for general SDR enthusiasts.
The app is called "SDR Direction Finder (RTL-SDR)" on Google Play Store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com. wildlifetracker.vhf
