Thesis on Locating Transmitters with TDoA and RTL-SDRs
Thesis on Locating Transmitters with TDoA and RTL-SDRs by RTL-SDR Blog
https://www.rtl-sdr.com/thesis-on-locating-transmitters-with-tdoa-and-rtl-sdrs/ (sourced and republished from RSS feeds)
Jan Hrach of the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics at Univerzita Karlova in the Czech Republic recently defended his Masters thesis titled “Passive emitter tracking“. The main theme of the thesis was the use of RTL-SDRs for tracking transmitters via the Time Difference of Arrival (TDoA) technique. TDoA works by having multiple receivers spread out over a region. As long as the receivers are synchronized in time, we can calculate the difference in time that a signal took to arrive at each receiver, which allows us to pinpoint the location of a transmitter. The challenge is in the timing synchronization, and receiver placement. The thesis abstract reads:
We have implemented a TDOA multilateration of transmitters on an unmodified rtl-sdr receiver using transmitters with known location as a timing reference. We present a brief theoretical background and describe the measurement process which includes several approaches that correct the timing and frequency errors between the receivers. Additionally, we have implemented an angle of arrival direction finder using coherent rtl-sdr.
