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Comment by magicmicah85 | Hacker News Reader

I love the design but go one step further - forget the API and get an SDR that is tuned to ADB frequencies at 1090 Mhz and gather the data yourself. Then she'll have a true radar.

Edit: fair point on what a radar is, today I re-remembered :)

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Nice app and writeup - but she won't have a radar - she'll have an app that displays the positions of airplanes. A true radar needs to transmit and receive.

The SDR is still just listening to the telemetry from the plane, which they transmit all the time for this ADS mode.

You can have passive radar:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_radar

But yes, it needs to be doing more than receiving telemetry to qualify, and there has to be something transmitting.

TIL what a radar is :)

That's a great shout, somebody even suggested I could become a contributor to FlightRadar and get a free transponder receiver!

Disregarding the other replies for a moment where they rightfully call out that it wouldn't be radar, wouldn't they still need a publicly available API for this data if they wanted to access it outside of their house (e.g., when at the park)? So at that point, why add the additional complexity if there's already someone sharing ADS-B data to OpenSky for your area?

Why add the complexity? Cause you can. You can also submit the data to contribute while at the same time receiving and displaying it in their webpage.

I have an Android phone with an OTG cable and SDR Touch and ADSB# - that lets me "see" any plane transmitting ADSB signals around me without any need for a network connection.

(I use that as part of my safety setup when flying drones. If I'm out of cellular connection or my iPad running FlightRadar24 fails, I have a backup self contained plane detection system.)

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