Hardware Krakensdr

krakensdr

KrakenSDR — five coherent RTL-SDR receivers for direction finding

Vendor: KrakenRF

Status: untested — catalogued from documented sources, not yet proven here.

Not maintainer-verified: nobody on this project has run this hardware yet. The two facts are recorded separately on purpose (D-027) — a correct recipe and a tested device are different claims.

What it is

Five phase-coherent RTL-SDR receivers on a single board with a shared clock, which is what makes direction finding possible rather than just five dongles in a hub.

What you can do with it

Radio direction finding and angle-of-arrival work — the ARDF and foxhunting use case on the amateur side, and signal geolocation on the security side.

Setup

The five channels appear as ordinary RTL-SDR devices behind an internal hub, and coherent operation depends on knowing which channel is which. They cannot be told apart by serial — RTL2832U dongles commonly ship identical serials — so the distinguishing key is USB topology (/dev/serial/by-path, or the bus position), not a by-serial symlink. This entry emits no symlink and none would help.

Known problems

Coherent operation depends on the channels being identified consistently across reboots. Because the five tuners share a vendor/product identifier and often a serial, topology (by-path) is what identifies them — a by-serial symlink is exactly the wrong mechanism here, the identical-units problem the Proxmark3 entry also hits. The direction-finding software stack is not in Debian and is Tier 2 work.

What is not yet known

Not separately identified. KrakenSDR is five RTL2832U receivers on one board, so each channel enumerates with the ordinary RTL-SDR identifiers already confirmed in the rtl-sdr entry (0bda:2838). What is NOT confirmed is whether the board exposes any additional control interface with its own identifier. The per-channel rules work regardless; only a board-level rule is unverified. The maintainer does not own one, so this needs lsusb output from an owner — a low-value gap, since the device is usable without it.

Who can close it: nobody on this project owns one — an operator who does can close it with one lsusb (how).

Access and permissions

Group membership required: plugdev — added at install, applies at next login.

Software that makes it useful

rtl-sdr, soapysdr-module-rtlsdr

Upstream: https://www.krakenrf.com/