Direction-Finding With Help From The Steam Deck

Course-locating, or fox hunting, is a well-known action in ham radio circles where by a team of people today armed with radios endeavor to identify a broadcasting source. Apart from currently being a pastime for amateurs, it’s also a required tool in the belt of regulators who are trying to monitor down violators of the air place. There are a whole lot of approaches to figure out the precise spot of a radio transmission, but this 1 manages to pull it off working with both of those a boat and a Steam Deck, each armed with a application-defined radio.

This job comes to us from [Aaron] who is very well known in the newbie radio circles for his SDR-focused Linux distribution named DragonOS which has all the resources essential for a excellent SDR knowledge, in this circumstance KrakenSDR and DF Aggregator. He’s loaded every thing up on a Steam Deck and left that in a safe location on the shore of a lake, although he carries 2nd device with the exact same program with him on a boat. With the two devices listening for a unique signal, he’s equipped to rapidly zero in on his buddy on the shore who is broadcasting on the 70 cm band thanks to the help of all of these application deals.

Whilst ham radio isn’t often recognised for becoming a youthful and thrilling exercise, the advent of program-outlined radio and other electronic modes feel to be shaking items up in that planet. Surely speeding all-around a lake on a boat is pleasurable on its possess as effectively, and a fox hunt like this can be completed with some thing as smaller and uncomplicated as a Raspberry Pi much too.

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