ADS-B Receiver and Server are Operational
A while ago I purchased a few of the RTL-SDR USB dongles for the purpose of exploring Software Defined Radio (SDR) and to also act as a poor-man’s spectrum analyzer. While cleaning some things up yesterday, I found these receivers and decided to see what I could use them for. I was surprised to learn about tracking and plotting aircraft via the ADS-B radio signals that many aircraft transmit. ADS-B is explained quite nicely on the Wikipedia page so I won’t get into that here. I found some information that talked about using a Raspberry Pi and one of these USB dongles to setup a ADS-B receiver and server. There are also ways to share data with aggregators, such as Flight Aware, PlaneFinder.net, and Flighttracker24, among others. Within about an hour I had this setup and working and it’s now pushing the receiver data to the three aforementioned servers using rather lightweight data packets.
ADS-B Receiver and Server based on Raspberry Pi and RTL2832L chipset USB Dongle
When talking with my girlfriend, she asked me why I did this, “to sell?”, she asked. A good question, because I didn’t know why, really. I thought for a moment and said that I wanted to do it just to do it, for the experience; for the understanding. It is really the basis on which my entire career is built on; doing something seemingly useless, or something where I can foresee the outcome, purely for the sake of doing it and gaining the experience. Very often I am given a challenge in my career where some seemingly useless experiment has given me useful knowledge so that I could solve a real-life problem. While the experiment may seem useless at first, there are often a number of skills acquired along the way that help me to solve a real-world problem. Perhaps one day I will need to put together an ADS-B transceiver. In this case, I think I will be ready and able. Next stop: AIS?
It all started when I watched my dad fix a very expensive RC car after I ran it to death, when I was a kid.