To address passive reconnaissance requirements in distributed detection scenarios such as drone swarms, traditional time difference of arrival (TDOA) localization faces two fundamental challenges. Firstly, high bandwidth consumption from cross-node raw signal transmission for correlation calculations. Secondly, clock synchronization constraints that inherently limit positioning accuracy. The TDOA measurements include clock synchronization errors among different receiving nodes, and improving synchronization precision would significantly increase costs. To address these issues, a differential time difference of arrival (DTDOA) localization algorithm is proposed for time-division ad hoc networks. The method first calculates the differential time of arrival from different radiation sources to the local node within each node. Then, observation equations are established across nodes based on the differential time difference of arrival. Finally, the target position is solved using a damped Gauss-Newton iteration method. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed algorithm eliminates clock synchronization errors through a differential observation structure, and its Cram-r-Rao lower bound depends solely on correlation calculation errors. Furthermore, it avoids the process of transmitting raw signals between nodes, significantly reducing network bandwidth overhead.