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.
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