Thank you to Danny from brokensignal.tv, who wrote in and shared the release of his new project, 'ChronAlert'. Danny describes ChronAlert as "a free PC-based live dashboard for radio, weather, alerts, and other live information".
ChronAlert appears to be a situational awareness dashboard that combines multiple live feeds into one screen. It includes feeds like weather and emergency, ham radio & propagation, hazards & infrastructure, and local radio & tracking.
On the local radio side, we see that RTL-SDR is supported for receiving and tracking aircraft and ships via ADS-B and AIS, and for receiving APRS messages. The dashboard also supports Meshtastic radios, allowing users to see heard Meshtastic nodes and messages.
ChronAlert is free at the basic level, which allows 2 saved panels and 1 watch zone. A one-time fee of US$39.99 unlocks 10 panels and 10 watch zones, as well as various other features.
If you want more information, Danny has also published a detailed article with screenshots about ChronAlert on his blog.
ChronAlert: Weather, Ham Radio, Alerts & More in One Free Dashboard
Thank you to Samuel Reynolds (aka SAMS0N1TE on GitHub), for writing in and sharing with us his project called 'LakeShark'. LakeShark is firmware for the LilyGO T-Display P4 (an ESP32-P4-based microcontroller with a 4.1 Inch touchscreen, detachable keyboard, GPS, and nine-axis motion sensor), which allows a USB-connected RTL-SDR Blog V3 or V4 to be used for P25 Phase 1 trunking, FM, POCSAG, ADS-B, and sub-GHz capture. Samuel writes:
LakeShark supports P25 Phase I conventional and trunked voice, analog FM, POCSAG pager decoding and 1090 MHz ADS-B, with a spectrum display and waterfall for tuning around.
There are a few other things that might interest your readers:
Passive sub-GHz pulse recording with export to Flipper .sub files, so captures can be transferred to a Flipper and opened in its Sub-GHz app.'
Offline maps showing aircraft and MeshCore nodes, plus GPS track recording with GPX export.
Mixed P25/FM scan lists and a field journal for saving notes with radio readings, position and sensor data.
MeshCore messaging and LoRa experiments using the onboard SX1262. The optional MIX-RF keyboard adds CC1101, nRF24 and NFC tools.
The T-Display-P4 touchscreen works on its own, but you can also use the keyboard or connect a Flipper Zero over Bluetooth. LakeShark also supports a headless ESP32-P4 Nano receiver controlled from the Flipper. That lets you keep the radio and antenna in a bag while tuning from the Flipper.
Version 2.2.0 is available now. Experimental work includes manually tuned P25 Phase II decoding, HackRF support and GPS-based scan filtering. Those have separate limitations documented in the wiki. Next steps include live-RF validation, Phase II automatic call following and further work on portable power and everyday usability.
There’s also an experimental CELL WATCH app for surveying cellular-band activity and comparing it against a saved baseline. It’s meant for spotting changes worth investigating, rather than identifying a cell site as malicious or claiming to detect an IMSI catcher.
LakeShark builds on xtrsdr, OP25 and other open-source projects. ADS-B Scope also provided a reference for part of the aircraft position decoding. Full credits are in the README.
LakeShark is part of a growing repertoire of ESP32-P4 microcontroller RTL-SDR applications. Just last week we posted about OrcSDR, a standalone RTL-SDR application built around the M5Stack Tab5. Back in May, we also posted about a portable open-source 1090 MHz ADS-B firmware for the LILYGO T-Display-P4.
Previously, RTL-SDR applications have only run on full general-purpose CPUs running an OS like Windows/Linux/MacOS/Android. But the ESP32-P4 has shown that commodity microcontrollers are now powerful enough to run an RTL-SDR too, via custom bare-metal drivers and software.
LakeShark running on A LilyGO T-Display-P4 next to a HackRF (left) and a Flipper Zero (right).LarkShark Screens
All the way back in 2014, we posted about Avare ADS-B Receiver, which back then was a simple RTL-SDR ADS-B receiver and map for Android devices. The author of this app, TFL, recently wrote in and shared that the app is now a modern, fully featured ADS-B app, having added many new features such as UAT decoding with aviation weather products and NEXRAD weather radar/lightning strikes shown on the map, aircraft pictures, better SDR support, traffic filters, and audio alerts.
ADSB Receiver lets you collect live air traffic data directly on your Android device using any RTL-SDR (RTL2832U) dongle and an OTG cable. No cloud. No fees. Just raw RF decoded in real time.
Dual-band reception — 1090 MHz Extended Squitter (ES) for worldwide traffic, and 978 MHz UAT for US general aviation traffic plus integrated weather products (METAR, TAF, PIREP, SIGMET, AIRMET, WINDS, NOTAM)
Live aircraft details — tap any target on the map to pull a live photo alongside aircraft type and registered operator
NEXRAD weather imagery — receive official NEXRAD radar images over UAT 978 MHz
Network send/receive —
Forward all received data to any GDL90-capable EFB app (AvareX, ForeFlight, iFlyGPS, DroidEFB, and others)
Stream dump1090/dump978 frames to any SDR tool on your network, or ingest from an external source
Bias Tee and Gain support — power an external LNA or active antenna, adjust Gain as needed
Proximity alerts — configurable range-based traffic warnings with optional callsign filtering; useful for drone pilots monitoring airspace
'Pants for Birds' recently announced the release of the ADSBee m1421 module, which they describe as the world's smallest dual-band ADS-B receiver.
The ADSBee m1421 is based on the LR2021 chip, and while it supports dual-band 1090 MHz and 978 MHz UAT, they note that 1090 MHz support is somewhat limited. This is because the LR2021 can listen to only one Mode S packet type, so it cannot receive squawk codes and receives fewer non-ADS-B packets. This, however, does not affect the usual application: tracking aircraft. The LR2021 also cannot implement timestamping or RSSI, meaning that MLAT is not possible.
Apart from its ADS-B capabilities, they have also broken out the LR2021’s 2.4 GHz front end as a waveguide, allowing it to be used as a mesh transmitter or LoRa receiver.
The ADSBee m1421 Module - Described as as the world's smallest ADS-B Receiver.
Thank you to Michael Russo for submitting news about the release of his new Apple iOS/tvOS app called 'Overhead 1090'. Overhead 1090 is an iPhone/iPad/Apple TV client for dump1090-compatible RTL-SDR-based receivers such as dump1090-fa, readsb, and PiAware builds. Michael writes:
It reads the aircraft.json feed over the LAN and adds what the stock web maps don't have: a persistent logbook of every airframe received, daily traffic reports, and a sightings feed for emergency squawks and rare types. The Apple TV version is the headline feature: a full-screen steerable radar scope for the living room.
Everything is local. No cloud, no account, no analytics (App Store label is "Data Not Collected"). It supports multiple receivers and includes a demo mode with sample traffic. One $4.99 purchase covers all three platforms.
Recently, we posted about DeepSDR, which is a program that automatically transcribes voice data from public safety radio communications and uses an LLM to categorize and plot incidents on a map as they happen.
In that post, we noted that we expect to see more projects like this soon, and sure enough, another program called "Scanner Command" with a similar angle has been submitted to the blog by author Benjamin Blood. Like DeepSDR the software listens to public safety and then uses voice transcription and an LLM to automatically understand, categorize and map incidents on the map. One additional feature that Scanner Command has is a fun tool that correlates ADS-B data with airband voice. Benjamin explains it best:
Scanner Command turns a radio scanner into a live AI incident map. A Uniden SDS200 covers the trunked digital public safety side (the LA area's P25 Phase II system, with ProScan driving the scanner and handing off every recording), and two $45 RTL-SDR dongles handle the rest, one decoding ADS-B with readsb, one capturing VHF airband transmission by transmission. Everything gets transcribed locally with Whisper, an AI extraction pass works out what happened and where, and about 30 seconds after a call ends it's a color-coded pin on the map with the audio one click away. Location matching is honest on purpose: an exact intersection match gets a solid pin, an area-only match gets a dotted one, and it tells you which.
Here's the design idea underneath it, and what I think separates it from the other transcribe-and-map projects out there: this is built for tactical situational awareness when the grid's down. The system does its learning while it's online, building its own gazetteer of local streets and places, learning unit callsigns and talkgroup names, priming the transcriber's vocabulary from real local traffic, precisely so it's more capable when it's cut off. Map tiles, geocoding, and hazard data are all cached locally with that scenario in mind.
The picture in my head has always been: grid's down, the box is running on backup power serving wifi, and my neighbors connect with their phones and everyone can see what's happening around us, instead of one guy hunched over a scanner relaying it. It's not shelf gear you dust off when something happens; the whole point is that running it every day is what trains it for the day you need it. Transcription is already fully local, the LLM extraction step currently uses a hosted model when online (it runs me about a dollar a day at 24/7), and the next build phase is a GPU box that closes that last gap with a local model.
The feature people are having the most fun with is the airband/ADS-B correlation. The system pulls spoken callsigns out of airband transcripts and matches them to ADS-B tracks by time and geometry, with match windows scaled by altitude and speed, plus hex-to-tail-number derivation. Click a plane on the map and hear what its pilot actually said, with a confidence badge when the match came from a partial readback. Beyond that: an ATAK feed (CoT/KML/GeoJSON), twice-daily AI briefs, a BOLO board, incident threading with a unit activity board, and helicopter orbit detection.
ADS-B aircraft position data automatically linked to airband voice transcripts
Benjamin adds that a public demo is available at https://demo.scannercommand.com. But he notes that "the public demo is a replay of two real days of traffic from my setup".
The software has not yet been released, and it does not appear to be free or open-source. There is a signup waitlist available on the scannercommand.com website.
This is an exciting time with AI not only helping to rapidly develop new software, but now being used to summarize and condense the vast amount of information about the state of the surrounding world available in the RF spectrum.
Scammer Command example mapped incident report
I Turned My Police Scanner Into a Live AI Incident Map (24/7)
Recently, Cameron Paczek has created a new project called SkyLight, where art meets technical implementation by displaying a live view of aircraft flying overhead on your ceiling. SkyLight consists of a projector, Raspberry Pi 5, RTL-SDR dongle, and some custom software.
The Raspberry Pi 5 and RTL-SDR receive live ADS-B data from local aircraft, and the projector points up at the ceiling and displays the live locations of aircraft as they fly overhead, effectively giving you a simulated X-ray through your roof. The projections also include the sun, moon, bright stars and constellations, and live satellites.
This project reminds us of a British Airways billboard in 2014 that used live ADS-B data to have a child on the screen point directly at incoming aircraft. We note that these SkyLight and billboard projects would not be possible without live ADS-B data, as ADS-B aggregation sites like ADSB-Exchange and Flightradar24 typically have a few-minute delay and require payment for their APIs.
Cameron aims to productize his idea into a ready-made kit and crowd-fund it in the near future. If you are interested, you can sign up for his notification mailing list over at skylightceiling.com.
AI Disclaimer: We note that this project appears to have been coded with the help of AI tools.
Skylight Ceiling Projecting Live Aircraft via ADS-B data on the Ceiling
Over on his blog, Zoltán Papp and team have created an interesting write-up investigating whether Semtech's LR2021, one of the latest LoRa transceiver chips, which draws only 10.4 mA at 3.3V, can be used as a single-chip ADS-B receiver at 1090 MHz. The LR2021 natively supports OOK modulation, and the datasheet even hints at ADS-B reception. Building on prior work, the team captured live ADS-B signals with an SDR and replayed them into the LR2021 eval board for repeatable bench testing.
The initial 3 MHz Rx bandwidth configuration had only a 50% packet success rate with no reception above -50 dBm, because the AGC could not settle within the short 8 us preamble. Extending the sync pattern into the Mode S 'df' field enabled reception across the full dynamic range, but at the trade-off of broadcast message reception only. Manchester decoding and CRC also had to be moved to the host, since, for an unknown reason, Manchester decoding with inverse polarity would not work on the chip.
Measured sensitivity came in about 5 dB shy of the theoretical -89 dBm, with most of the gap blamed on the eval board's front end being matched for 868 MHz rather than 1090 MHz. The team notes that with a modified front end, the theoretical sensitivity should be possible.
With the rise in Raspberry Pi costs due to the consumer memory chip crisis, cheaper ADS-B receiver hardware is welcome. Some existing microcontroller-based ADS-B decoders that we've seen recently include ADSBee and PicoADSB.
Signal Hound SDR Hardware used to Capture and Replay ADS-B For Testing
