Get eyes in the sky with your Raspberry Pi | Hacker News Reader

Get eyes in the sky with your Raspberry Pi

blog.alexellis.io

171 pointsalexellisuk25 comments

I use one of these (in a way) whenever I fly. I have an RPi running Stratux with a WAAS GPS reciever and two modified RTL-SDR dongles, one for each ADS-B band. It then rebroadcasts all this info over a wifi network that my ipad picks up and displays with foreflight. The whole thing sans ipad was ~$100, is super reliable, and fits cleanly in a small case. The commercial version (Stratus 2s) is $900 and has reliability issues.

On a side note, these only pick up AC that are broadcasting ADS-B which is most commercial aircraft and a minority of commuter/personal planes. This will change at the beginning of 2020 when the FAA will mandate all aircraft will need it (or at least anyone planning to ever operate in a mode C ring/near a major city)

As a previous HN post indicated, majority of that $900 price tag probably went to product validations and certifications :)

Interesting... I've never had reliability issues with my Stratus.

Not permanently mounted flight hardware, no TSO required. Only certification required for that would be basic FCC ISM transmission stuff, the same as your router. If they used a precertified module (like most internet of shit devices) you only need the harmful emission testing. It's also very unlikely that they voluntarily went through any of it because the devices regularly overheat and fail.

When you fly, as a pilot or a passenger? I assumed passenger but then this doesn't make much sense to me; so you must be a pilot.

Pilot. I rent 1970s aircraft so it's nice to have a backup set of avionics.

I should mention, this is also a fun thing to have on airline flights as you can see the route you're flying, other planes around, speed, altitude, where you are in line for the runway, etc. There are even free alternatives to foreflight for android (avare) so you only have to make the Stratux hardware.

Once you've gone to all the work of setting this up, you need to upgrade from the rudimentary dump1090 web interface. The best open source web UI I know of is Virtual Radar Server, which I run on my Raspberry PI using Mono: http://www.virtualradarserver.co.uk/

VRS displays much more information about flights and about your receiver performance, and is more customizable.

SDR aside - wow a rpi DVB-T tuner for 12 quid!? Is there an ATSC tuner for US at a price like that?

Sort of. You can buy an ATSC tuner on Amazon for about $35. There isn't any SDR software written for them, so you are buying a single purpose item.

The RTL-SDR dongles can't receive ATSC because ATSC is 6 MHz bandwidth and the RTL can only handle 3.2 MHz max.

I'm fascinated by the idea and practice of SDR but I find the focus on tracking airliners to be rather boring (for most) and uninspired. Surely we can come up with something more interesting and potentially discovery-orientated, or at least a little more awesome, such as perhaps radio astronomy or somesuch?

I find it interesting that Flight Aware (alone) has 12m active users. Hopefully for those who haven't "been there and done that" this will give an accessible intro to SDR and the use of containers for IoT

The title made me think of receiving satellite images from weather satellites: http://www.rtl-sdr.com/rtl-sdr-tutorial-receiving-noaa-weath...

I agree. The only advantage ADS-B has is that it doesn't require building an antenna unless you want a lot of range.

I've found that receiving weather satellite images makes for a much more interesting project, and seeing live satellite images tends to interest people a lot more than knowing where planes are.

In general, I find these kinds of comments strange.

There are many applications I might find more interesting too. However rather than criticizing others I spend my time feeling vaguely guilty for not doing any of them...

Thanks.. I appreciate the comment

I agree, I found this post really inspiring to go out and spend a few pounds on getting some equipment to try some of these things out... I might well be far more interested in some of the other applications, but this post is a cool idea of what can easily be done...

There are two ways to read a comment that says "I don't find this [useful|inspiring|interesting]." The first is to take it as a criticism, and the second is to take it as a statement of fact that is strictly limited to the person saying it. Where it's ambiguous it's far better to assume the second meaning, if only due to the Principle of Charity.

I suppose that the concept I was trying to articulate was better expressed as follows: "It is quite unfortunate that the baseline "Hello World!"-type project for SDR is listening in to airliners' telemetry, as it is widely available by other means, entails RX-only skills and equipment, and does not really provide wide avenues for later development".

That is, of course, my personal opinion, but it is also something of a critique: wouldn't people be more excited if the baseline project involved TX/RX, obviously with slightly more involved hardware (and limited to ISM bands & transmission power limitations)?

The baseline "Hello World" has always seemed to me to be capturing the full FM spectrum. I think that was the first example given in Gnuradio.

I know the posted article is nothing new, but it doesn't seem like a great idea to discourage people from writing up their experiments, even if it isn't anything amazing and new...

I built something like this and several others. I'm far more interested in RX/TX projects though.

I find it to be a pretty fun and interesting hobby. I'm regularly picking up transmissions from 200+ miles away which to me is pretty neat. For extra fun, put up a big ol VHF antenna and receive ATC communications as well--you'll need a second SDR for that. Then try to figure out which flight on your plot corresponds to which airband communication.

> Surely we can come up with something more interesting and potentially discovery-orientated, or at least a little more awesome, such as perhaps radio astronomy or somesuch?

There are a many examples of other things that people have come up with. head over to http://www.rtl-sdr.com/ and the "Tutorials" section (under "Featured Articles") includes these:

* ADS-B Aircraft Radar

* NOAA Weather Satellites

* Meteor-M Weather Satellites

* P25 Digital Voice Decoding

* Trunked Radio Following

* TETRA Voice Decoding

* ACARS Decoding

* DRM Radio Decoding

* AIS Ship Tracking

* Radio Astronomy

* POCSAG Pager Decoding

* Decoding Weather Balloons

* Analyzing GSM Signals

* Measuring Filter Characteristics

* Inmarsat STD-C NCS EGC Decoding

* Outernet

I tried building the ACARS Decoding code actually and was just getting segfaults. I need to go back to that at some point and raise a Github issue.

Very good list of applications above!

many flights are not required to broadcast this signal....

[Citation Needed]

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