Airplane Tracking

Melan
Participants	Melan
Skills	Raspberry pi, Linux, airplanes, radio, rtl-sdr
Status	Active as fuck
Niche
Purpose	Use for infra
Tool	No
Location
Cost
Tool category

Melan

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What

• 

A raspberry pi with a RTL-SDR tracking airplanes. Right now it's based on https://github.com/jprochazka/adsb-receiver which provides a nice interface with some statistics, although the project is pretty much dead so eventually we might just put something together ourselves. The pi is accessable as a webinterface on http://planepi.dhcp.nurd.space/

The antenna is located above the bar under the skylight.

How

Automatic Dependent Surveillance Broadcast (ADS-B) is a surveillance technology in which an aircraft determines its position via satellite navigation and periodically broadcasts it, enabling it to be tracked. The information can be received by air traffic control ground stations as a replacement for secondary surveillance radar, as no interrogation signal is needed from the ground. It can also be received by other aircraft to provide situational awareness and allow self-separation. ADS–B is "automatic" in that it requires no pilot or external input. It is "dependent" in that it depends on data from the aircraft's navigation system. This signal is transmitted at 1090Mhz and 978Mhz.

The decoder software (Dump1090) takes in the raw data from the SDR and parses it, we are running the forked version made by Flightradar24, which means the feeder also sends data to Flightradar24. We are also feeding this data to Flightaware and Planefinder.

Hardware

It's running on a Rasberry Pi 2B, the RTLSDR receiver is a Flightaware Pro Stick Plus.

Flightaware Pro Stick Plus

• Chip: R820T2
• Amplifier: 19dB with 0.4dB noise figure and OIP3 +39dB
• TCXO: 0.5 ppm
• Filter: 1,075 MHz to 1,105 MHz pass band with insertion loss of 2.3 dB; 30 dB attenuation on other frequencies
• Power Draw: 300 mA
• Weight: 17 g / 0.6 oz
• Dimensions: 95 mm x 32 mm x 13 mm
• Antenna Port: SMA female (requires SMA antenna cable and optionally N-male adapter for large antenna)
• Range: Over 300 nm/550 km depending on installation quality
• Performance: 10-20% more Mode S messages in installations where filtering is beneficial

Ports

List of all then ports, whom they belong to, and their function.

Port	Service	Description
80	lighthttpd	Basic Webserver
8080	Dump1090	Dump1090 map, doesn't seem to work directly
3002	Dump1090	Dump1080 raw data
3003	Dump1090	SBS output
3004	Dump1090	Dunno
3005	Dump1090	Beast?
30053	PlaneFinder	Planefinder web interface

Todo

• Move the RTL-SDR closer to the antenna to minimize signal lost this has been done, with great results!
• Make a different antenna/remake the current antenna
• Write down to which sites we feed to