Dragon Labs
Software Defined Radio
Test Equipment
This project is launching soon.
Dragon Labs CR-8 is a high-performance, yet affordable, 8 channel coherent SDR receiver. It is capable of 8MHz per channel with 12 bits of dynamic range and can tune anywhere from 25MHz to 1750MHz. That’s more channels, more bandwidth and more dynamic range than the KrakenSDR, giving you more capability.
It can operate with all 8 channels coherently, or with an arbitrary set of coherent and noncoherent groups. This can be used for example to be coherent on two frequency bands at once by having one set of channels tuned to one frequency, and the others to another frequency. If desired, all channels can even operate completely independently while remaining perfectly synchronized in time.
CR-8 was designed by Alexandre Rouma, known for creating the SDR++ software, as his masters thesis. You can read more about how the CR-8 was designed, prototyped and tested in his thesis paper. Alexandre then went on to found Dragon Labs, which is now run by close friends while he works on his PhD.
Coherent receivers have many fascinating uses that amateur radio operators and hobbyists have not been able to experiment with much due to the high cost of the hardware and steep learning curve. Thanks to its high channel count, coherence and phase precision, the CR-8 is very well suited to many array processing algorithms:
The CR-8 already has native support within SDR++, making it the ideal software to experience its RF performance. The CR-8 can therefore already be used for all your spectrum browsing, SIGINT and general receiving tasks.
The CR-8 will also be natively supported in SatDump, a popular satellite data processing software. Due to the CR-8’s high bandwidth, dynamic range, sensitivity and selectivity, it is a perfect candidate for VHF to L-band SATCOM. In the longer term, the multichannel and coherence capabilities of the CR-8 may also be taken advantage of for simultaneous multi-band reception, beamforming and diversity reception, allowing for even higher receive performance.
The CR-8 comes with a native GNUradio source block letting you use it directly within your flowgraphs and avoiding the need for performance limiting abstraction layers.
The CR-8 comes with a simple but powerful C API that gives you full control over the device and provides the received samples as synchronized buffers of industry standard 32bit floating point complex values. You can check out a pre-release version of this API and it’s documentation on our github page.
For other software, you can always use the CR-8 through the SoapySDR driver. Do note that this adds a layer of abstraction and thus reduces performance. We will likely provide forks of common software with native support for the CR-8 added in and will submit these additions back upstream.
All of the host-side code, including the driver, host utilities, GNUradio integration and SoapySDR integration will be provided under under the LGPLv3 and GPLv3 licenses.
Due to both strict NDA constraints and rampant counterfeiting issues in the SDR industry, we unfortunately do not plan to release the firmware or board files. This device is the culmination of over 2 years of hard work from multiple people, as well as thousands of dollars worth of investment out of our own pockets, we cannot afford for low quality copies to be sold on aliexpress within weeks of release.
Since we do however very much believe in right to repair, the full schematic will be made available under a Creative Commons license to allow for painless troubleshooting and repair. We will also provide a service manual with troubleshooting instructions, expected voltages and waveforms, licensed under Creative Commons as well. Most parts used in the design are off-the-shelf and widely available, and we aim to provide replacement for the more difficult to source parts like the tuners as long as we are able to source them ourselves.
At Dragon Labs, we do not use AI. All our hardware, software, firmware and documentation are fully designed and written by humans. We pride ourselves in the quality of our work, and refuse to sacrifice it for quicker turn around times. If you reach out to us for support with our products, you will always talk to a person, not a chatbot.
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