
Tracking Planes with RTL-SDR and Dump1090 - acdanger
http://www.satsignal.eu/raspberry-pi/dump1090.html
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antirez
Dump1090 is a clear example of a weekend project that can escape the
abandonware route. I wrote it in ~2 weeks during xmas of two years ago, and
almost never touched it again if not for a couple of hours more, for lack of
time. However the OSS miracle happened, and people continued to use it, fork
it, modify it, and have fun. It does not turn like that very often.

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omh
I've been running a similar setup for a few months, feeding data to
[http://www.flightradar24.com/](http://www.flightradar24.com/). If you upload
data to them like this then you get premium access to their site and app which
is nice. In fact I found that using the site was easier than accessing my own
data on the pi so I haven't really used planeplotter etc.

I found that I can pick up a lot of planes even with the stubby antenna that
came with the DVB stick. But I'm pretty close to the Heathrow flight path
which gives me a slight advantage!

The dump1090 process uses 30-40% CPU on my pi so I start it up with nice
-n+19. And it does seem to crash quite often so I've got something to check
and restart it.

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keenerd
Cut the stubby antenna down to 68 millimeters and it will do even better. Set
it on a cookie sheet for more effectiveness.

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JCJoverTCP
antirez, i recall you from the good old days, and i was pleasantly surprised
that you hadnt given up on hacking around. this is great stuff, it opened up
an entire cottage industry, and i am personally grateful. i had always been a
radio guy with tons of heavy gear, using clunky serial interfaces to interact
with my radios. now its all practically portable and multitudes more
affordable. thank you for all your work, and for transforming an entire
industry. i use dump1090 when i am not tuning pirates or -trying- to capture
medical pocsag/flex.

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RIMR
The RTL-SDR is a ton of fun!

I built a small ADS-B Antenna out of Coaxial cable and even inside my Seattle
apartment, I can track planes ~150 miles away.

You can also tap into trunking systems and decode NOAA weather satellite
images.

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yuvadam
An awesome, comprehensive writeup. I really would like to see more people
setting up ADS-B receivers at home and expand the coverage.

Personally, I run dump1090 on a cheap TP-Link WR703N at home [1]

[1] - [http://blog.y3xz.com/blog/2014/04/24/feeding-data-to-
flightr...](http://blog.y3xz.com/blog/2014/04/24/feeding-data-to-
flightradar24-dot-com/)

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dchichkov
A somewhat unrelated question. It seems like beacons broadcasting their GPS
location at 978 MHz (30cm) from altitude could be used to measure parameters
of the atmosphere. Take 3 frequency-locked receivers, separated by a few
meters, and it seems like, one can get the wind vector along the line of the
airplane/receiver. Feasible?

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jetbeau
[http://balus.info/](http://balus.info/)

^this guy gets about 500km coverage with the setup of antenna he has

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elteto
For the uninitiated, could someone briefly go over this? I find it extremely
interesting and would like to pick it up as a hobby.

What kind of hardware you need to get started? How does it track the planes,
do the planes broadcast their info periodically? Hooking this up to a web
frontend using Google Maps or Google Earth sounds like a very fun weekend
project.

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RIMR
You need an [RTL-SDR USB device ($8)]([http://www.amazon.com/RTL-SDR-DVB-T-
Stick-RTL2832U-R820T/dp/...](http://www.amazon.com/RTL-SDR-DVB-T-Stick-
RTL2832U-R820T/dp/B00C37AZXK/)) and an [ADS-B antenna (Homemade from Coaxial:
$5)]([http://www.balarad.net/](http://www.balarad.net/)).

Oh, and a computer.

It's a pretty cheap way to get started with amateur radio!

~~~
jlgaddis
Thanks for the links. I looked into doing something like this a while back (I
already have my own stratum 1 NTP servers at home and work and this is kinda
similar) but I only found commercial receivers that were a bit more than what
I wanted to spend. This is quite affordable.

