I’m looking at setting up 3 Krakens as permanent installs at three separate sites for triangulation. Does anyone have recommendations on best practices for what antennas to use and cabling? I’m looking Arrows large array with the 146, 220 and 440 Mhz elements. Has anyone used these antennas and are they durable for prolonged exposure to the outdoors?
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One technical nuance worth keeping in mind with the Arrow Kraken arrays is that they’re geometry- and frequency-optimized, not broadband arrays. You run one element set at a time, and the boom spacing is chosen so inter-element spacing stays under ~0.5λ to avoid ambiguous bearings. That geometry matters more for DF accuracy than perfect resonance.
Because Kraken is receive-only, the elements don’t have to be exactly resonant to work — strong signals will DF fine even off-band, with a few dB of sensitivity loss. That’s usually acceptable unless you’re chasing weak emitters or covering very wide frequency spans.
For permanent multi-site triangulation, the bigger technical wins tend to be identical antennas and spacing at all sites, stable mounting, and matched or calibrated feedlines. Whether you go with a band-optimized array like Arrow or simpler omni elements really comes down to whether you’re targeting specific bands or prioritizing wideband coverage.
Thank you. Would you happen to know of any other antennas and mount that you can recommend for my application?
One thing that helped me early on was thinking of Kraken in two layers.
At the radio level, KrakenSDR is absolutely wideband — you can see and tune across a large frequency range. But at the DF level, you’re always solving the problem around one tuned center frequency at a time. That tuned frequency is where the array geometry and phase relationships are the most accurate. Everything above and below that is still visible, just with progressively reduced sensitivity and broader lobes.
That doesn’t mean “you can’t see it” — it just means the DF solution gets less sharp as you move away from the center. Medium to strong signals still show up fine, they’re just less tightly constrained.
Because of that, there are basically two ways people end up using Kraken in practice:
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Have a specific frequency or narrow band in mind, and optimize the antenna spacing/elements around that.
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Pick a high/low range you care about and choose a center frequency in the middle, accepting that accuracy tapers off toward the edges.
That’s why the Arrow Kraken element sets work well in real use. They give you predictable geometry at the center frequency, but they’re still usable outside it. I run an Arrow set myself and it’s been very solid. The stock whips also work surprisingly well, and simple quarter-wave verticals or half-wave dipoles behave just fine as long as the array stays consistent.
So it ends up being less about “the perfect antenna” and more about being intentional about where you center the array and keeping the five elements coherent and repeatable.