Monitor Airplane Traffic with a Raspberry Pi | Hacker News Reader

Monitor Airplane Traffic with a Raspberry Pi

brianchristner.io

238 pointsvegasbrianc113 comments

Commercial flight trackers encourage enthusiasts to feed them data, then take money from operators to hide that data. If you want everyone to have access to the data, consider feeding a network that doesn't censor or block anything, like ADS-B Exchange (https://www.adsbexchange.com/).

A project like Dictator Alert (https://dictatoralert.org/) uses ADS-B Exchange because the authoritarian regimes they're tracking can just pay a commercial site to hide their aircraft—they don't like being tracked.

My Advisory Circular bots (https://skycircl.es/bots/), which tweet in real time whenever they detect police, FBI, military, news or fire aircraft circling, and my "What's Overhead?" Siri shortcut (https://twitter.com/lemonodor/status/1238149529469202433) use ADS-B Exchange because a lot of the most interesting aircraft are the ones that are blocked on commercial trackers.

This is really interesting stuff. Do you know of any services which show aircraft present in ADS-B but missing in, say, FlightRadar24?

Try https://globe.adsbexchange.com/ for a good unfiltered map.

ADSB and Opensky are the big ones. IIRC one of them censors aircraft on the owners' request but because they're lower profile lots of planes that are blocked on Flightaware are still visible. One of them also has an API that returns "interesting" aircraft (military, government, owned by celebrities etc) which is fun to look at

Edit: I think it's Opensky that filters their data. Not many planes are filtered but their coverage also isn't as comprehensive as ADSBExchange. For one specific usecase I did find Opensky's API easier to work with

Seconded. In the SF Bay Area the “fun” (or worrisome) planes are on adsbexchange but not FlightRadar24.

I'm curious what you mean by worrisome in this context?

I'm not who you responded to but I'd guess they mean something like a Boeing E-6B Mercury "doomsday plane," with the full capability to command the launch of the country's ballistic missile submarines and ground based ICBMs, a plane with access to enough firepower to plausibly end our civilization... worrisome in any context!

Seconding this. If you have a PiAware setup or other off the shelf ADS-B tracker, it's super easy to add feeding to ADS-B Exchange. https://www.adsbexchange.com/how-to-feed/#scriptmethod

A Pi4-based rig can feed multiple services; I'm currently feeding six or so, including a semi-provate service that specialises in low-flying military traffic in the UK (I'm just off the main cross-London helicopter route, so get a lot of traffic that wouldn't be tracked any other way than by MLAT from Mode-S).

Just curious, why is the network private, or semi-private?

It was originally set up to cater for folk photographing low flyhing in the Welsh mountains, particularly around the Mach Loop. So it's historically a subscription service with its own ICAO lookup database for military aircraft in the UK, which is very accurate indeed...

Now anyone can subscribe to 360radar, but it is limited to the UK and a small part of northern Europe. It's not the cheapest service, but if you're an aviation photographer in the UK it and its linked community are a key resource.

I'll have to check that out. I've been feeding flightaware since November 9, 2016 it would be nice to feed ADS-B Exchange as well.

It's noteworthy that a relatively modern protocol like ADS-B (and Mode S transponders) has completely no regard for information security. It would have been very easy to generate a random address on startup and assign a correlation code only known to ATC in the clearance. Like the original 4 digit mode C codes were not identifiable.

That wouldn't stop any traffic collision or ATC function from working but would prevent persistent tracking of for example private jets.

> That wouldn't stop any traffic collision or ATC function from working but would prevent persistent tracking of for example private jets.

I'm not sure how well that would work w/r/t ATC hand-off and their ability to look up flight plans.

Furthermore, there's the problem of getting the random ID to ATC after the plane has "started up."

They're already doing this, but there's no reason for it to be a random ID—It's an ephemeral ID assigned by the FAA. So you know your ephemeral ID & registration, the FAA knows your ephemeral ID & registration, and while everyone else can see your ephemeral ID they do not know the aircraft registration it's tied to.

https://www.faa.gov/nextgen/equipadsb/privacy/

An interesting image recognition project would be a camera watching departures from an airport that records the tail number of a plane and correlates it with the ephemeral ID to feed back into the exchange.

> would prevent persistent tracking of for example private jets

Why? They are using our airspace. Looking down in to our backyards. I have a right to at least get an identifier I can use to report to authorities.

I've worked with VVIP executive protection teams before and if the trip needs to be secret they will schedule plane swaps along the trip or rent a jet that is not attributable to the company.

The only time I would bother looking into your backyard would be if I was about to land off-airport into it.

ATC isn't the only party who needs to see the aircraft IDs.

As a pilot, it's valuable to be able to see tail numbers to help correlate what I'm hearing on the radio with what I'm seeing on my displays. I can guess who's who from position reports, but seeing the tail number leaves no ambiguity.

There are also some smaller facilities that use ADS-B to monitor traffic, but aren't networked into the national ATC radar system.

Aviation events will also setup their own temporary control tower, and frequently use ADS-B as an aid for sequencing traffic. (Again, without access to the national ATC radar network.)

For folks who need privacy, there are a couple options that already exist - UAT privacy mode or private Mode S addresses. Though notably, both of these are only available options for domestic flight within the US.

Aircraft systems I know don't show the callsign of TCAS targets (although they should be able since it's in the extended mode S reply). I think only iPad based systems in small general aviation typically do that? I've never felt like I missed that information when flying.

This isn’t a “lack of information security”, the whole point of transponders is the broadcast your aircraft identity and position.

Having to coordinate with every ATC jurisdiction along a flight path would be extra work and leave room for errors.

Additionally it wouldn’t work for flights that don’t have a planned route, like a civil aviation pilot who’s just cruising.

It’s akin to having a license plate on your car.

It will work, it's called "Privacy ICAO Address" (PIA) by the FAA, and it's already being phased in: https://www.faa.gov/nextgen/equipadsb/privacy/

Love this stuff. I have a view of the Chesapeake and watch AIS stuff for marine traffic. I notice Local police, Navy and USCG vessels do not show up.. Pretty sure they transmit tho. Anybody know of similar sites that show unfiltered AIS info?

How about MarineTraffic?

https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/home/centerx:-12.0/cent...

My best guess would be that most commercial provider like MarineTraffic wouldn't show those vessels because they would be running duplicate MMSI numbers to hide their identity to make them harder to track.

If you go to marinetraffic.com and look at a military port like San Diego you'll see plenty of military ships (for example https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/home/shipid:5892129/zoo...). Sometimes they spoof, but often they don't, and the trackers show them even when they're spoofing.

Thanks. Been using marine traffic.com for years, and vesselfinder.com for a while also. Rarely if ever see the vessels I'm referring to in either place.

ADS-B exchange added to an existing FR24 install.

For anyone reading this doing same - you need to fix the ports. FR24 pi image outputs to port 30003. adsb is looking for 30005 and thus fails to find the existing feed

edit it in /etc/default/adsbexchange to align them

No we don't need to fix the ports, we recommend installing a standalone decoder. Data going through fr24feed is likely not to work for MLAT. Anyhow that port 30003 is unreliable as fr24feed at least used to crash with multiple connections to it.

In a similar spirit: FR24 should fix their installs and ports.

30003 is SBS data? Don't change the ADSBx data port. FR24 feder client disables 30005 beast port to make it hard for people to feed other sites.

Install a separate decoder like readsb and drop that FR24 mind control. Then set FR24 craptastic client to read from the decoder if you insist on feeding FR24 ...

Comments like this make me wonder whether I want to be anywhere near ADSBx & community at all

The Pi became part of my essential hardware for flying with the Stratux project. You could plug an RTL-SDR into a Pi, add a wifi adapter, and have it broadcast weather and other ADS-B equipped aircraft to some of the flying tools. With Avare, ForeFlight, FlyQ (most of the other EFB software out there except Garmin) it will overlay the information on the moving map.

http://stratux.me

is the project I'm most familiar with. If you just want to use the hardware it is a very easy paint by number setup.

https://www.reddit.com/r/stratux

If you are looking for a community.

If you wanted to jump into a GoLang project, this is a really interesting codebase.

https://github.com/cyoung/stratux

Thanks for the project links. I will have to check them out.

How do you feel about the reliability of this setup? I currently use a Dual GPS for (VFR) navigation and am wanting to get ADS-B in, but I want to reduce the risk of distraction caused by a failing receiver (or backup AHRS) in flight. Has the Stratux proven as reliable as more integrated solutions like a Sentry Mini?

Yeah I would be greatly concerned about using a Pi for this task. The SD card issues alone are enough to warrant a different platform.

I'm usually my own worst enemy of messing with a working image, so if it was broken, it was usually my own fault.

I use the same Bluetooth GPS receiver with Avare on an Android tablet in conjunction with a Pi and a pair of antennas. The stock images are more or less fool proof if you pick USB radio receivers that are on the supported list. I had wired a GPS to it too at one point - but had an incident with a model airplane and a lake, so continue to use the external Dual. I've never gotten around to putting it in a one unit case.. basically end up tossing it in the back seat dangling everywhere.

I replaced our Stratus (guess where the project name originated from) with the homemade one. On the recommended hardware, it is solid. I was also able to (usually) make it work on non-certified (if you can call this hand rolled combination certifiable) hardware like the pi zero. Hit and miss with the newer stuff. Need to pick up one of the newer pis to help out with the porting. By far, my biggest issue was making sure the battery pack was charged.

https://www.sportys.com/stratus-3-ads-b-receiver.html

I built a Stratux and used it with Foreflight. Honestly, the reliability wasn't great. The dump1090 process would randomly disconnect, generating nuisance alarms from my tablet - usually in busy airspace. It also had trouble picking up some ground stations.

I switched to a Garmin GDL-52 instead. Reliability has since been rock solid. Received signal strength from ground stations are an order of magnitude better.

Or just run antirez's dump1090 https://github.com/antirez/dump1090 with the appropriate ADS-B dongle

> Ever wonder what airplane is flying overhead?

Also - not all planes broadcast ADS-B. Also - theres a privacy push to mask a plane's real tail number in ADS-B broadcasts - relevant for private planes (not commercial)

I'm an open-source dump1090-on-rPi fanboi. This thing works great. I live near a somewhat dangerous river mouth, and dump1090 shows me who the helicopters are when they show up. Coast Guard? TV News?

I use it with a cheezy indoor antenna for my rtl-sde dongle. Plenty of range for what I'm doing.

I can also see the high-altitude airliners going to and from JFK.

If you live in the sticks (I don't) flightAware will provide their rPi / receiver / antenna for free, in return for your data feed. I think they're still trying to get more receivers in places like Labrador and Greenland -- definitely fly-over territory.

Yes, I plan on building a custom antenna so I can place it outside

The antenna from Pimoroni in the UK are a good price and give you a good splat (I get nearly 200nm from near sea level in London with an antenna in a window).

Regarding the last bit, that is correct. We (I'm FlightAware's ADS-B Program Manager) send ADS-B receivers free of charge to places we need better coverage. Labrador and Greenland are great examples. If you're interested please visit our website, specifically the FlightFeeder page.

Thank you! I have been running one of those FlightFeeders for over a year now. Antenna mounted on the roof at 11m above ground. As an EE I can say those feeders have much better hardware than average Pi+RTL-SDR+wire. Thanks to a very good GNSS receiver inside I can also now tell exactly where my house is at any time ;). Have you also tried to use the data from GPS network for any other purpose than flight tracking (seismology, atmospheric studies)?

Glad you like our gear and really appreciate you being a host!

We haven't done anything with the GPS data yet and probably won't with this generation of FlightFeeders. We're currently in the design phase for a Pi4 based kit with a brand new FlightAware designed SDR. Part of that project includes an Epic for what we're calling "Science Packages" internally. What you suggest fits in with that concept.

Do you have any plans to include AIS for ship tracking as well? I guess that would need a second SDR, or perhaps you can cycle through the two frequencies and get enough messages to still be usable?

Edit: Or maybe support for ATC radio traffic? Again, it probably needs a second SDR, but it would make it much easier for those who are interested than it is now. I would love to be able to just run some daemon and get an audio stream on a local port and maybe an audio player in the web client.

Considering FlightAware is getting rich off your data, selling blocking services, actively working against enthusiasts through lobbying with NBAA and EU authorities.

FA / FR24 offering nothing in return but a fake enterprise account, a bunch of gimmicks, basically good marketing to trick fools into proving them 10 of millions of dollars in free data a month.

Suggest looking up https://www.adsbexchange.com/ and talking to them about hardware - that way everyone can make good use of the data instead of FlightAware and Daniel Baker getting rich from a business model based on extortion.

Absurd to me that people brag about hosting FlightAware or FR24 hardware while in reality all they are is getting fucked while FA and FR24 run off with bags of money.

The world of ADS-B decoders is an annoyingly messy one, but antirez's dump1090 is the oldest decoder there is and you almost certainly don't want to use it--The decoding logic hasn't been improved in more than 7 years.

Wiedehopf's readsb is the latest decoder, which is under active development, and designed to pair well with the front-end UI that is also under the most active current development, tar1090.

Installation instructions for readsb: https://github.com/wiedehopf/adsb-scripts/wiki/Automatic-ins...

The world of ADS-B decoders is annoyingly confusing, mostly because people keep forking one executable (while keeping the same name) that does both decoding and web UI instead of creating a decoding library where we could pool our collective efforts at improvement.

  Name                                          Last update
  ----                                          -----------
  dump1090 (antirez)                            > 7 years ago
  dump1090 (mutablity)                          6 years ago
  dump1090 (adsbexchange's fork of mutability)  4 years ago
  dump1090 (adsbexchange's fork of fa)          2 years ago
  readsb                                        4 months
  dump1009 (fa)                                 1 month ago
  readsb (wiedehopf dev)                        6 days ago

Thanks for that summary; wish I had it when I first started feeding. The number & genealogy of all the forks confused me to no end (well, at least for a few hours).

Tacking on two more software pointers:

- The mikenye collection of docker packages is well maintained, well documented, and a very easy way to get started feeding. Example: https://github.com/mikenye/docker-readsb

- I made a little CLI "gui" to monitor/visualize the SBS1 stream from dump1090 and clones. It was just a little excuse to understand the telemetry/protocol better. Welcome any suggestions or feedback! https://github.com/mik3y/flightmon

> Also - theres a privacy push to mask a plane's real tail number

Please, call them registrations. The majority of countries don't use numbers in aircraft registrations, and carry them on the fuselage instead of the tail...

Any pilot or controller anywhere in the world knows the term tail number. I own a US registered airplane and the number is on the fuselage, but it’s still referred to as a tail number. I’ve had Mexican and Dominican Republic controllers ask for my “tail number.” And most American planes have letters in their registration as well. “Number” isn’t literal. And “tail” isn’t literal. But it’s universally understood and it’s distinguished from “fleet number” which may be on the nose or fuselage.

Over the radio “registration number” is 6 syllables. “Tail number” is three syllables. And brevity is essential on radio frequencies. However far more common is “call sign” which may or not be the “tail number/registration.” I have flown outside the US frequently, mostly the Caribbean and Latin America, and tail number is extremely common. The ICAO flight plan calls for an Aircraft Identification — which is the technically correct term internationally but I have never heard that in spoken radio communication in any country.

The point is that there is some aviation “slang” that is widely accepted and used. While we can get mired in pedantry, it doesn’t really add to the discussion. I don’t think many people discussing aviation topics are confused about the term “tail number.”

> Also - not all planes broadcast ADS-B.

Aircraft that do not broadcast ADS-B have not been airworthy in the US since January 2020.

Only in airspace where a transponder is required. Most airspace in the US does not need a transponder unless you're near a major airport, and therefore doesn't require ADS-B.

Aircraft without an electrical system are also exempt from the transponder requirement.

Please do not run Antirez's version, it is much less updated than Readsb or FlightAware's dump1090 fork

https://github.com/flightaware/dump1090

https://github.com/wiedehopf/readsb

A few pointers to get a receiver going if you're interested and don't want to use the Flightaware image: https://github.com/wiedehopf/adsb-wiki/wiki/adsb-receiver-sh... https://github.com/wiedehopf/adsb-wiki/wiki/Raspbian-Lite:-A...

Currently I have a similar setup but the data is sent to FlightRadar24 and you get a $499.99/year Business subscription for free for doing exactly this (but sending the data to them).

So, the question I wanted to bring up (and might be controversial) is to know what the differences between the two are? Taking a quick look around it does feel like FlightAware has a lot more openness to it than FR24, which is interesting for me, but I am interested in other opinions on this?

I mean, getting the subscription for pushing the data is always a nice bonus, kinda tempted to just push data to both, and have another Pi sitting in my loft!

Personally, I love just being nosey and seeing the flights around my area, but I am just a bit strange like that ;)

You can send to many different services at the same time!

Started going down the rabbit hole of links just after posting this, and yes! I had no idea! Just need to work it out! - At the moment I am using the FR24 image they sent out, but I have spotted that the SD Card is in read only mode at the moment and something doesn't look right.

Maybe its a sign telling me to go down this rabbit hole!

Thanks ;)

I've moved my Pi4-based system over to SSD; living here near Heathrow I destroyed my first SD card in 3 months of writes...

There’s also radarbox.com if you’re interested

The "Business Subscription" is just a ploy to get people to feed them data for free. If you contact them and actually ask for business services the price is wayyyy more.

You should feed to ADSBexchange which is a free and open community run network for flight tracking. They don't censor planes for money like FA/FR24/Radarbox/etc do.

The dongle is what’s monitoring the traffic. You can get one on Amazon for $25. Here’s mine: https://www.amazon.com/RTL-SDR-Blog-RTL2832U-Software-Define...

I use airplanejs to display the airplanes overhead: https://github.com/watson/airplanejs

There’s a ton of other interesting stuff you can do with the dongle, too. Here’s a great place to start: https://luaradio.io/new-to-sdr.html

I've been working on an updated version of the AboveTustin twitterbot code to work with the latest Piaware images, using chromedriver and tar1090, along with Josh Douch's free ICAO hex lookup APIs (I should be adding ADSBExchange support soon, but, hey kittens!).

You can find it here: https://github.com/shbisson/OverPutney . This version is currently at 33 days uptime on my Piaware set up, and tweeting at @OverPutney.

How reliable is the data? E.g., I found a number of planes with tail numbers N333AX - N335AX flying along the ocean near King City, CA in weird patterns. But the data also says "took off in King city".

ex: https://flightaware.com/live/flight/N330AX

Are these planes sending bogus data (like shifted by a tens of miles ?) They are old Archer Hunter planes (apparently) owned by some trust., and two of them seem to have flown very close together.

It is very illegal to transmit false location data.

Some older planes don't have GPS enabled transponders so they can only be accurately pinpointed when interrogated by radar. To get a fix tracking networks will calculate the time the signal arrived at multiple receivers and work out the math to ballpark the location.

The deadline for ADS-B conversion was January 2020, so pretty much all of the older aircraft have either been converted, or can no longer be flown without a waiver (which, at this point, will pretty much only be given if you're flying to a shop for the upgrade).

N330AX is a Hawker Hunter, a jet fighter from the 1950s.

It's not surprising that it's owned by a company nor that it flies in formation with similar aircraft.

Flying an airplane like this over water for noise abatement purposes is also common, because they're really loud. The flight path looks like airshow practice.

The military does a lot of training and exercises off the coast near Los Angeles, and those aircraft are most likely "aggressor"/target aircraft. See, e.g., https://defpost.com/atac-hawker-hunter-aggressor-aircraft-cr...

Their ownership is obscured via the TVPX trust company, but they're really operated by Airborne Tactical Advantage Company (ATAC): https://atacusa.com/

This sort of training happens all the time, and you get used to seeing lots of aircraft circling around over the ocean in southern California.

Edit: Right now in that area I see aircraft from at least two other contractors that do threat simulation for military training, plus an unknown military aircraft. Sometimes you can check the AIS tracking sites and see military ships in the area, too.

Yes, there are a similar bunch of Falcon 20s from Flight Refuelling in the UK that are worth tracking...

It seems like everyone is running an ADS-B feeder these days. I'd love to see a similar article that discusses capturing and decoding ACARS messages between planes and dispatch.

So how do I actually see which airplanes are in the sky at a given moment? I went here:

https://flightaware.com/adsb/stats/user/vegasbrianc

(from TFA) but it's all just stats. I want to see "Ok, that's an NBC helicopter overhead" or "Oh, that's a flight to Denver overhead")

Or is that only available if you have access to the pi itself?

Correct, you need access to the Pi itself. However, you can use the FlightAware map to zoom in on Denver

Doesn't the main view show that? https://flightaware.com/live/

Check the Flightradar24 app (https://www.flightradar24.com), I use it all the time to determine the helicopter or airplane nearby.

Wow this is great. Do military aircraft show up? Sometimes I hear them roaring overhead and want to know what kind it is.

If you want to see military aircraft use ADS-B exchange: https://globe.adsbexchange.com/ there is a filter (click the U button on the map) that will only show military aircraft. The commercial ADS-B tracking sites filter out these and many other aircraft. Enjoy.

If you are running your own receiver, you should see them on your map, especially if you are part of a MLAT network for calculating position data for aircraft that only transmit Mode-S data.

The key issue is ICAO hex to aircraft mappings, and there you'll need to either do a lookup against (often commercial APIs) or build your own registration database from public data.

Besides the other sites already mentioned, there’s also radarbox.com

Our local monitoring system consists of ADS-B receivers (Antenna > filters > SDR dongle > Raspberry Pi) on five mountain tops feeding into a local instance of Virtual Radar Server[1] which aggregates the data and provides a web frontend.

We pick up traffic from Sacramento to 1/3 the way down the Baja Peninsula.

[1] https://www.virtualradarserver.co.uk/

What would really make me excited would be if Pi4 could eliminate the RTL-SDR altogether by doing the DSP via ARM Neon instructions.

Is it even close to being powerful enough?

Well I do have an Nvidia Jetson that I can also get going...

The challenge is that the raspberry pi doesn't have an analog to digital converter with enough bandwidth to sample the ADS-B data, or any way to downconvert the signal from 1090MHz to see it to begin with, so you are going to need hardware.

ADSB uses pulse amplitude modulation, so if you built or bought a downconverter and amplifier, you might be able to pick up the modulation by sending the downconverted/amplified signal to a GPIO pin and reading its state at say 5-10 MHz.

It'd be pretty messy and you'd have to write the demodulator from scratch, but might be able to pickup the frame decoding from one of the other products out there to actually read the content.

Would be a really fun project but not likely to save money and definitely not time.

Excellent comment, thank you :)

The RTL-SDR is only an RF front-end that brings down the desired RF signal to a baseband frequency, followed by an quadrature AD converter, followed by a USB interface.

All the DSP operations are already done by the Raspberry Pi.

http://aaronscher.com/wireless_com_SDR/rtl_sdr_info.html

In the diagram above, it shows “DSP” but that’s just two basic multiplications and a low pass filter. It doesn’t do any heavy lifting.

If you want to get rid of the RTL-SDR, you’d need that analog RF block and the AD converter inside the Pi. That doesn’t make a lot of sense of a general purpose SOC.

So how do I actually see which airplanes are in the sky at a given moment? I went here:

https://flightaware.com/adsb/stats/user/vegasbrianc

(from TFA) but it's all just stats. I want to see "Ok, that's an NBC helicopter overhead" or "Oh, that's a flight to Denver overhead")

You would need to be local to see the Map from the blog post. However, you can use FlightAware to zoom into Denver to see whats overhead.

So you'll go to a site like https://globe.adsbexchange.com/

This might be the wrong forum for my question. Please direct me to the correct place if that's true.

I don't use the coax connection in my home at all. Meanwhile, there is a coax jack on my roof in case I ever wanted to put a TV there and use actual cable.

I assume it's possible to mount an antenna on my roof and use the existing coax wiring to connect to the dongle FlightAware offers? Has anyone done something similar?

With the right impedance matching and good coax cable I don't see why not.

It's nice to see tutorials like this one, especially since FlightAware is community powered. The cost for most of the materials is relatively small, but what seems to be a somewhat problem is the availability and price of properly supported RTL-SDR USB sticks.

The Piaware Pro stick is one of the best out there; it has the appropriate 1090MHz filters.

You can check out https://www.radarbox.com/raspberry-pi ;)

From a practical point of view, isn't the growing use of satellite ADS-B tracking making these types of devices less important?

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aireon

You can feed FlightAware and FlightRadar24 and ADS-B Exchange all at the same time.

There’s also RadarBox.com https://www.radarbox.com/raspberry-pi

Collecting the data is just the beginning. You can build a lot of interesting stuff from there. Check out my ADS-B project: www.foxtrotcharlie.ovh

This reminds me of my post back in 2017 of a very similar topic - Get eyes in the sky with your Raspberry Pi - https://blog.alexellis.io/track-flights-with-rpi/

Someone mentioned dit to me today, so I thought I'd stop by. Good post Brian. I haven't actually got mine connected anymore, but still find it fascinating.

For a less well known tracker you can also check RadarBox.com

US be like: "you're not allowed to see the live position of aircraft"

US also be like: "let's make it super easy for anyone to tell where every aircraft is"

I am getting a little annoyed when people do a basic Linux tutorial, but make it seem like some sort of incredible use of a Raspberry Pi.

RTL-SDR stuff is pretty popular, but plugging one into an RPi just doesn't feel like much of an accomplishment on the RPi front.

Clicked the article wondering, does it boil down to "Install PiAware?". Yup, it boils down to "Install PiAware." I mean, at least put a twist on it and build your own half wave antenna or something!

What would impress me would be two SDRs, one monitoring ADS-B and the other tuned to VHF, pulling down the ATC radio transmissions, recognizing the speech, deducing the tail numbers, and then visually associating them with the ADS-B traces on the map. Now that would be impressive! I've had VHF and ADS-B on my roof for the past few years but never got around to doing the speech parsing.

Always room for improvement agreed. I plan on expanding on this further since it is so much easier than previously to get up and running where it took me days to get the container running with everything.

Since I'm in lockdown I have a lot of time on my hands to break out my soldering iron and more hardware. ;)

Yea I didn't mean to come across as debbie downer. Keep going forward with the setup! Do consider experimenting with different antennas. You can probably double or triple your range.

Plus antenna building becomes its own rabbit hole haha

You could also try MLAT with the ATC comms to get a plausibly more deterministic source for the transmissions. I've done a decent amount of work with voice recognition for fire/police and the technology just isn't quite there yet. ATC comms probably have a lot less variation than police/fire calls, so you could probably train some custom models with a bunch of labeled ATC data to get you in the vicinity.

Couple other sources:

- Passive radar - Some pretty interesting results in this area https://www.rtl-sdr.com/tag/passive-radar/

- Sound detection/recognition/localization - Could correlate with ADSB to label sounds with known airframes to help train an identification model

- Video detection

Cool thanks. Will have a look

If you knock out any of theses definitely share that as well. I live a hundred miles from Wright Patt and constantly see aircraft that don't show up on any of these sites and don't transmit ADS-B that I'm able to receive.

+1, a lot of these tutorials are just clickbait.

I'm open to suggestions to make it better

Honestly, either put in innovative, non-trivial content or remove it.

I'm really glad this got posted here. I'd never heard of PiAware, and now I have a new project I can do with my son that'll have tangible results and be a great learning process for both of us.

Thanks for writing this up and sharing it to HN, vegasbrianc!

What part of it annoys you? Or maybe rate your level of annoyance from 1/10 along these steps.

- He builds the receiver using hardware he bough/owns/borrowed and software/documentation that he finds on the Internet.

- He documents the process and his rationale/experience.

- He shares that document on his blog

- Someone posts a link to the article on HN

- Sufficient HN readers vote on the link to get it to the front page.

- People comment on it.

- You start typing in the comment box.

- You click submit.

Because it’s fun!

For a "fun" project you usually don't want your main machine to run 24/7 just to do this task. Energy consumption is not that great for a full x86 machine. But a Pi? No problem running that forever.

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