Could you please provide some information about the compared performance of Kraken and Kerberos, if available?
If I can remember well, it was announced that kraken had some receiver improvements.
I am not very sure, it seems that kerberos at maximum gain has some noise that worsens reception. I did not manage to see when this happens, perhaps it depends on strong nearby signals. I have 4 FM notch filters inserted.
In demo videos, people does not set gain to maximum, I do not know if it has anything to do with this.
With normal RTL-SDR blog v. 3 dongle, and notch filter inserted, I can set gain to maximum with no side effects and it works very well.
So my questions are these:
Is this a known issue of kerberos?
Would it be improved if I upgrade to kraken?
Is there any general info about RX performance, to compare both radios?
Unfortunately, kraken price seems to have risen a lot and purchase needs to be carefully considered. Is this a temporary situation or would it last long?
The RF performance of Kerberos is not significantly different to Kraken. The main advantage to Kraken is the improved switching architecture, which means that coherence calibration is fully automatic, rather than requiring the user to manually disconnect the antennas. And of course the extra fifth tuner in Kraken.
Unfortunately manufacturing and business costs have risen ALOT over the past few years, so the price of KrakenSDR has had to arise accordingly too.
I also had some other reasons for that, so I bought a Kraken SDR, I will have one Kerberos and one Kraken.
Kraken SDR has bias tee, so it would be easier to use LNAs to improve SNR, I suppose.
I am not sure where the noise comes from, Kerberos SDR could have a high noise floor, but even so it was a very interesting device. With certain limitations (as all tools have), it does a very good direction finding work.
By the way, I am working in an inconspicuous pedestrian mobile four antenna array inside a backpack, to avoid being asked by idle people on the street. It seems to work very well at 144 MHz band. The array radius is only 10.5 cm, the demo software warns that it is small, but in practice it performed well enough! I suppose the performance at 432 MHz will be even better.
I wear it with 45 degrees offset, to best fit it inside a 30 litre backpack. If you do not have a car of your own, I would suggest testing this setup.
By the way, independently of my own investigation, perhaps you could be interested in studying inexpensive LNA usage with Kraken, or some other RF performance hack. Perhaps you could even sell a commercial product if you study that question. I suppose I could be interested.