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Comment by chrissnell | Hacker News Reader

I would love to see an open source network of ADS-B collectors form, similar to what's available for the APRS-IS [1] network. The big ADS-B players (Flightaware and FlightRadar24) get their ADS-B feeds from the FAA (5-min delayed) and supplement it with real-time over-the-air collection from volunteers around the world. These companies give away small ethernet-connected collection servers to the volunteers and in exchange, they get the data and keep it proprietary.

It sure would be nice if there was a network to collect and pass around this data for free consumption by whoever wanted to use it.

[1] http://aprs2.net/ http://www.aprs-is.net/

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ADSB# has the ability to stream data to sdrsharp.com, but I don't know what they do with it.

ADS-B won't be awesome in the US for another 5 years, though. My office is at one of the busiest regional airports in the country. Very rarely do I see any aircraft that provide more identifier and altitude using my RTL-SDR and homemade antenna with ADSB#.

Your antenna is probably bad. I live in the middle of nowhere USA and get planes all the time. (Using rtl_adsb.)

Regardless, his statement is true that ADS-B is not sufficient for full coverage in the US right now. I've seen estimates as low as 25% for the proportion of US carrier aircraft currently ADS-B. FlightAware in particular uses far more than just ADS-B.

Can you share how many and how far away? Are you near an ADS-B ground station (which will rebroadcast all traffic if a single ADS-B squitter/output is near) or only receiving active output from airplanes?

The ones I do see are typically freight carriers (FedEx, etc), or international airlines (Virgin). AFAIK, most of the flights into and out of this airport aren't those types. So, of the air traffic I do see, the majority don't identify with more than identifier and altitude. Lat lon is few and far between.

Very true if 5 years even makes it popular. Most regional carriers and even legacy carriers do not have ADS-B out in them. The adoption rate in general aviation is dismal. I believe under 5% is what AOPA is saying, my personal experience is 1 guy out of 30 owners I know has installed it. The benefits just aren't there yet.

Indeed, it would be nice. Something like that shouldn't be too difficult to do. People all around the world would send their ASD-B data to a centralized server which would process it all and make it available via a nice, stable API. Something like http://www.openstreetmap.org/.

Flightaware I wasn't aware of, though PlaneFiner[1] is another good resource.

[1] www.planefinder.net

Just sent you an email about this...

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