Kraken Direction Finding SDR with Ollie VK7NFI

00:01:24 - This presentation and demo of the crowdfunded Kraken Software Defined Radio that is built specifically for direction finding. Thanks to Ollie VK7NFI for presenting this interesting equipment.

00:01:50 - What is the Kraken - it was originally the Kerberos SDR that evolved into five individual RTL-SDRs running from a common clock and the glue hardware with some very smart software.

00:02:48 - It is a crowd sourced product and raised $900,000 in under two months and went into manufacturing right when COVID struck.

00:04:30 - What can it be used for? Five independent receivers from 20MHz to 1.3 GHz for GNU radio, SDR++, SDR Angel, etc. Passive Radar is another application but is somewhat contentious due to it infringing some international laws. Watch this space.

00:07:57 - Radio direction finding using both linear and circular array direction finding. The five antennas are placed into a line or circle and used to direction. Ollie describes the different direction finding methods ending up with the way the Kraken performs which is Correlative interferometry.

00:11:00 - Ollie goes into the cloud based system that shares the information from the Kraken to the Cloud which can be displayed on a notebook or mobile phone application. We went through the arrangement with five antennas on a vehicle array.

00:13:50 - Ollie showed the Byonics Foxes that he did some experiments and then went into the Circular Array Calculator spreadsheet to setup the best resolution with the antenna array. There were some static slides of the direction finding and the data stored and sent to the cloud software and showed on the mobile application.

00:19:46 - Ollie went through what else they have planned for the Kraken.

00:23:22 - There was a screen recording from Ollie's phone of his direction finding using the software. This was fascinating as it actually showed the multi-pathing of the signal with multiple lobes shown on the map.

00:35:30 Ollie then answered questions from the audience.