ADS-B Active PCB Antenna for the RTL-SDR

This ADS-B antenna by amateur radio hobbyist F5ANN combines a 30dB LNA preamplifier, bandpass filter and antenna tuned for 1090MHz together on a single PCB board. The LNA preamplifier helps boost weak signals, whilst the bandpass filter helps to remove interference from others signals such as GSM. The novel thing about this antenna is that everything is neatly packaged into a single PCB board, which makes this antenna very compact, and yet have high performance.

F5ANN uses his combined antenna together with an RTL-SDR dongle and the RTL 1090 ADS-B decoding software with PlanePlotter, and was able to receive 194 simultaneous aircraft signals with a message rate of 556 messages a second at distances of up to 250 nm.