ADSBox: New ADS-B Decoding Software for Linux
Recently Roman, a programmer and reader of RTL-SDR.com wrote in to let us know about his ADSBox software which is a free opensource Linux based ADS-B decoder (page in Russian, use Google Translate) with several interesting features. ADSBox contains a decoder and a nice web interface which allows you to view flight information in a table or in Google maps, or even through a Google Earth interface. The software also automatically loads up a photo of an aircraft if you click on it in the map. Roman has actually been working on ADSBox since 2011 and seems to have recently added RTL-SDR support.
The software can be compiled on a PC with gcc, or on an embedded ARM device with arm-linux-gcc. We gave the software a quick test on an Ubuntu PC and found that it worked as expected. Install instructions are on the page linked above, but just in case here are our notes on compiling the software.
- Download and extract the latest version from the bottom of the page into a folder called adsbox on your Linux system. (Latest version at the time of writing: adsbox-20150409.tar.gz. Note that the Google translated download link did not work for us, use the original untranslated link if you need to)
- Download and extract the latest sqlite source files from http://www.sqlite.org/download.html (at the time of writing: sqlite-amalgamation-3080900.zip) into a folder called sqlite3 on the same level as the extracted adsbbox folder (not inside adsbbox folder)
- Edit the Makefile and set “WITH_RTLSDR = yes”. If cross-compiling for an ARM device set CC = arm-linux-gcc, otherwise leave this setting alone.
- Run “make”.
- Now you can run ADSBox with ./adsbox –rtlsdr.
- Go to 127.0.0.1:8080 in your browser to see and use the interface.
