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Comment by lloydpick | Hacker News Reader

2 Pis for dealing with ADS-B (airplane data), one for 1090Mhz, the other for 978Mhz. I could run that on the same one, but seemed easier to just split them up given some of the software is a bit picky with device IDs. The 978Mhz is much quieter than the 1090Mhz, so I also run a private SpyServer (https://github.com/lloydpick/docker-spyserver) for listening to radio transmissions.

1 Raspberry Pi for a running a very stupid sitcom sound thing. Using a camera it tries to recognise who you are, then play a random sound assigned to you out of a little speaker. Think of like the cheering/clapping when a guest or celebrity enters the room in a sitcom tv show, and replace out the clapping with whatever sound you want.

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This reminds me of this project I saw on twitter a while ago where a small arduino with a motion sensor would play the Seinfeld bass riff every time someone entered a room.

Love the sitcom sound thing!

Me too. I've always though I and my friends should all have individual theme songs that play when they enter the room. Now I have another weekend project...

What do you use for receiving the radio traffice, something like an RTL-SDR, or something else?

For the ASD-B traffic I use the FlightAware USB dongles - https://flightaware.com/adsb/prostick/

And for the general radio, I use the RTL-SDR Blog USB dongle - https://www.amazon.com/RTL-SDR-Blog-RTL2832U-Software-Telesc...

Why do you listen to all these radio transmissions?

For the airplane data, I always liked browsing sites like flightradar24, planefinder etc, and wondered how they aggregated the data, and it sort of just went from there. I also now send the ADS-B data to open projects rather than commercial only entities.

In terms of the random radio transmissions, it was simply because I was already installing the two ADS-B antennas in my attic, and thought I might as well just put up the standard telescopic antenna that came with the USB receivers as well. I'm a newbie in terms of radio, so it's just been interesting scanning the bands to see what you can find and listen to.

A future project I have is to try and pick up the 443Mhz transmission from a really simple weather/temperature sensor I got from Walmart a while ago, since apparently that's what it uses to talk to the little base station it came with.

I'm only familiar with the commerical ones (flightaware etc.). What are some of the open ones?

https://www.adsbexchange.com http://www.adsbhub.org/ https://opensky-network.org/

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