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Comment by beambot | Hacker News Reader

> we have received and processed ADS-B signals collected by our autonomous boat...

I wish the article would've explained: (1) What is ADS-B, and (2) why does it matter. Without that context, I have no idea if this is significant or not...

EDIT: Given FlightRadar's business... I'm guessing it helps with flight tracking. This wasn't entirely apparent from an outsider reading that blog for the first time.

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ADS-B signals (from my limited knowledge) are transmitted by aircraft showing some basic data like location, altitude, speed, callsign, aircraft model and a few other things. They only have a range of a few hundred kilometers so a website that does flight tracking using a global network of (volunteer) receivers, it's a step in their coverage to be picking up signals over the oceans.

Also it's just cool.

You can track planes over you with free software and a small homemade antenna:

Free software: https://github.com/antirez/dump1090

Inexpensive antenna: http://antirez.com/news/46

Aircraft broadcast ADS-B signals which contain tracking information, which is used by live flight trackers to map out each flight in real-time. The problem is that there are large blind spots when aircraft go over oceans due to the lack of receivers, so this is intended to increase coverage.

It's an industry specific, aviation, app. Chances are, if you are there you have a glancing familiarity with what it means and how it works. If you didn't know and were interested 2 minutes on Wikipedia would have you sorted out.

Unless writers are getting paid per word most computer blogs aren't defining CPU, GPU, USB, HDMI for their readers.

Good info on ADS-B https://www.renderlab.net/projects/ADS-B/

Also just google "Defcon ads-b", there are a few.

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