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Comment by RIMR | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

Because it’s fun!

+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.

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.

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