Chirp sounder measurements with KiwiSDRs (2)

Using the recent work on KiwiSDR waterfall recording (see kiwiclient/kiwiwfrecorder.py) it becomes possible to search for chirp sounder signals in KiwiSDR waterfall data, continuing the topic from this post.

kiwiwfrecorder.py connects both to the 'SND' and the 'W/F' websocket streams. The 'W/F' stream contains sequence numbers for each waterfall line which are used to synchronize the waterfall to the audio data. These sequence numbers can also be used to attach to each waterfall line a corresponding GNSS time tag obtained from the 'SND' stream. As the waterfall data can arrive before or after the audio data, both are combined in a third thread using python Queues for thread-safe communication.

About half an hour of waterfall data was recorded on the AB1LD KiwiSDR using the highest KiwiSDR waterfall speed which turns out to provide waterfall data about for each SND frame, i.e, each 512/12000 seconds. Thanks to the owner for setting up this KiwiSDR and allowing unrestricted access!.

Then the recorded waterfall data (saved in a .npy formatted file) was rebinned in time to 1024/12000 second bins and exported as a .png file. Switching from python to octave, a search for chirp sounders was performed for chirp rates from 80  kHz/s to 130 kHz/sec in steps of 1 kHz/sec: for each chirp rate and for each start time the content of the waterfall bins was summed up along the corresponding line (Hough transform).

Two chirp sounders were found, each having a repetition rate of 720 seconds (12 minutes) with chirp rates of 82 kHz/sec and 100 kHz/sec, respectively. It might be interesting that this list of chirp sounders contains entries for three chirps sounders with 720 second periods located in Norfolk, VA, Kingsville, TX, and in Puerto Rico.

The plots below show zoomed waterfall diagrams around the chirps and on the bottom panel the result of the chirp search, i.e, the sums of waterfall bins along lines with a given slope.

1^st chirp sounder detected using the AB1LD KiwiSDR

2^nd chirp sounder detected using the AB1LD KiwiSDD

Talk on KiwiSDR TDoA is available on YouTube

This is just a short note that my recent talk on KiwiSDR TDoA at the Software Defined Radio Academy 2019, which took place during the German Ham Convention in Friedrichshafen, Germany, is now available on YouTube.

For other talks from this meeting see http://youtube.sdra.io/.

KiwiSDR GNSS position solutions using an extended Kalman filter

This is an update to this blog post, see also https://github.com/jks-prv/Beagle_SDR_GPS/issues/147. References for using Kalman filters for GNSS positioning are, e.g., DST-Group-TR-3260.pdf and these proceedings from ION GPSGNSS 2003.

The plots below show time series of variations in ECEF X,Y,Z coordinates, the oscillator correction, and the number of available satellites.

SPP - single point position; EFK - extended Kalman filter

The process noise covariances are set to 5e-5 for the X,Y,Z coordinates (KiwiSDRs are not expected to move) and the covariances for the time and the oscillator correction are build from Allan variance parameters as described in a497248. It would be interesting to measure the Allan variance of the used oscillator.

The advantages of using an extended Kalman filter include:

• Once a position solution has been obtained, the Kalman filter can be updated with fewer than four satellites: this will improve the availability of those KiwiSDRs with poor GNSS reception for TDoA work.
• The residuals per link in the Kalman filter update are used to exclude satellites with bad time measurements.
• Large deviations from the nominal position due to bad satellite geometries are avoided.

Kalman filter position solution for the KiwiSDR

This is work in progress, updates can be found here on GitHub.