That Plane Overhead: Starring Our Friends SDR, ADS-B, I2C and KLGA | Hacker News Reader

That Plane Overhead: Starring Our Friends SDR, ADS-B, I2C and KLGA

jeremybmerrill.com

100 pointsbentaber16 comments

Interesting. This guy is like my twin in New York. I too have an ambient bus tracker (http://blog.jgc.org/2012/03/ambient-bus-arrival-monitor-from...) and an SDR/ADS-B/Pi set up that shows the Heathrow arrival flying over my house (or at least not so far away).

If he's built himself an Arduino 'games console' that fits inside a can (http://blog.jgc.org/2011/05/playing-pong-on-pair-of-candy-ca...) I'm going to be creeped out.

you've got me beat there, doppelganger!

I love the idea of putting the bus tracker inside a model bus. Do you mind if I steal that idea?

Of course!

     Plagiarize,
     Let no one else's work evade your eyes,
     Remember why the good lord made your eyes,
     So don't shade your eyes,
     But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize -
     Only be sure always to call it please 'research'.

You can also use ADS-B to track government planes overhead! See what neighborhoods they are spying on and where they are based! Self-adjusting tinfoil hat not include.

(ADS-B broadcasts were what caught Gov owned aircraft circling recently in Baltimore and other cities.)

Planes also broadcast air temperature, wind speed and direction along with the usual altitude, speed and position. A lot of planes are flying overhead so I thought it might be neat to combine that data, as usual a quick search turned up some researchers in NL who already thought of that a few years ago. [1]

There's a lot of data around us, and lots cool projects to collect and analyze it as well.

[1] http://bibliotheek.knmi.nl/knmipubTR/TR336.pdf

You can find all kinds of things in UAT. Not just weather but you can find various equipment information like the landing gear coming down, message sent from the plane (SMS, crew) and there have even been times they broadcast credit card data!

Very cool! I had no idea that information was there! Time for a new project.

It likely varies depending upon the fleet at your local airport, but ADS-B implementation in the US has a long way to go before the 2020 deadline. Last time I checked (early 2015) only about 30% of carrier jets near MSP (a major Delta hub) had ADS-B installed/turned on. My understanding is that the cost is under $5,000 per aircraft - it astounds me that for all the money wasted on security theatre the aviation industry has dragged it's feet on ADS-B implementation.

Alright, who else saw this on Alec Muffet's twitter feed while reading about the Sun 2's secret message?

Cool, but I'm not sure about the practical uses. Perhaps to test the accuracy of all the flight trackers out there??

A lot of the flight trackers out there are using data from setups very like this! They are often crowdsourced (augmenting that by buying data for areas with little or no coverage like the FAA data for Atlantic/Pacific crossings).

It's a fun thing to setup and watch. :-)

We sell a similar receiver in our store! https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/mini-digital-tv-stick

FlightAware.com will send you a free one if you are in an area they need coverage for and are willing to keep it plugged in!

[1] https://flightaware.com/adsb/

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B011HVUEME/ is the latest version I think, but I have the same version linked in your shop.

>Cool, but I'm not sure about the practical uses.

paradoxical difference between that consumer grade setup and military grade system:

http://www.businessinsider.com/the-flaw-in-the-buk-missile-s...

"So the Buk can pick up the signal of an aircraft. But if it's operating in standalone mode, it can't tell whether that aircraft is a military target, or a jetliner with nearly 300 people onboard."

who needs practical uses?

Exactly, I'm a geek, I don't have practical uses for lots of things that I do.

I've got four of these "ADS-B receivers" (Raspberry Pi + SDR dongle + antenna) up and running in four different locations with a few more that still need to be set up and deployed. I don't have a practical use but it is pretty neat.

I considered trying to write my own stuff to do MLAT for aircraft without ADS-B transmitters after I get the others deployed but my math probably isn't that good.

Another thought was to log all of the location data from all my receivers to a central database and do "something" with it, although I've yet to figure out what that "something" is/would be.

> I don't have practical uses for lots of things that I do.

Seems like you're trying to come up with one!

My only point about practicality is that I don't know what I would use this for. Wrong term I suppose.

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