Hi Andrew,

You must be able to establish the true time relationships between samples
from each radio. The accuracy of the measurement of and stability of the
time relationship will be primary contributors to how accurate the
calculated direction to a signal will be.

You could use a transmission from a known location as a runtime
calibration. By correlating the two sample streams and accounting for the
true angle of arrival and geometric relationship of your antennas and the
calibration transmitter you can measure the time offsets. Some radios allow
a 1 PPS signal or trigger signal to be input and use that to set internal
clocks and timestamp samples. This allows for a very accurate initial time
synchronization.

A subtlety which is often missed is that if the sample clocks on the two
(or more) radios are different then the time synchronization will drift
over time. This is why shared frequency references are often used. The
combination of the two provides a fixed, stable, and very small time
relationship between the two.

The use of a GPSDO in each radio can provide time and frequency references,
but both are imperfect. When true shared references are used the
imperfection is also shared and so irrelevant for most intents and purpose.

On Fri, Nov 17, 2017 at 1:25 PM, <vk4...@tech-software.net> wrote:

> Hello
>
>
>
> I have a question regarding the use of two software defined radios for the
> purpose of TOA time of arrival radio direction finding
>
>
>
> Do the software defined radios have to be locked to each others clocks to
> work properly or is it good enough that they just pass RF that can be used
> to determine time of arrival ?
>
>
>
> Andrew
>
> _______________________________________________
> Discuss-gnuradio mailing list
> Discuss-gnuradio@gnu.org
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>
>
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