n1ywb's Journal: My Senior Project

My senior project is a distributed radio direction finding system, known as the Distributed Amateur Radio Tracking System, or DARTS.

In traditional RDF systems, a single station takes direction readings at various geographical points and plots the intersections of the readings to determine approximately where the transmitter is located. Multiple stations may communicate to find the transmitter faster and with a greater degree of accuracy. This is a slow a tedious process.

My approach is to automate the process by interfacing a RDF unit to a computer, using a GPS to determine position and direction, and interpret the readings automatically to make the whole system useful to untrained individuals.

Multiple DARTS units may communicate via any network layer (EG 802.11, AX.25, EtherNet, RS-232, etc) to work cooperatively. DARTS units may be mobile or stationary. Obviously a single stationary DARTS unit would not be usefull, but three or more stationary DARTS units would allow for accurate radio loction within, and somewhat beyond their boundries.

I'm using a PowerMac 7500 running Yellow Dog Linux 2.3 for my development box. I'm devloping a USB interface for the RDF box. My mobile test unit is a generic K6-2 300, running Gentoo Linux 1.4.

My text editor is VIM, and my window manager is blackbox.

For my GUI interface I am writing a patch for XASTIR.

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