Over on YouTube user adsbrus shows us his project which is an in car ADS-B aircraft tracker using a Raspberry Pi mini computer and an RTL-SDR. The system uses an LCD screen mounted where the car radio usually is to show aircraft identifier, altitude, and speed information in text.
Over on Gough’s Tech Zone blog, Lui has posted a writeup about his experiences with combining multiple remote RTL-SDR ADS-B receivers to privately obtain ADS-B aircraft data from multiple antenna’s at multiple locations. His setup is shown in a diagram below. He has one remote antenna connected to a Raspberry Pi, one to a remote PC and one to his main PC.
In order to do this he used the Linux based dump1090 ADSB-B decoder and hub software on his main PC. Lui was even able to compile and run the ADS-B hub portion of dump1090 on his Windows PC using Cygwin, but was unable to get the decoder part to work. It doesn’t matter though because the dump1090 hub can receive data from any ADSB decoder, such as ADSB#. His results look very promising as can be seen by the timelapse of plane traces in the image below.
Lui also has some other interesting ADS-B + RTL-SDR posts that you should check out where he tests ADS-B reception with a Mini R820T dongle.
Yesterday we posted about the command line rtl_acars ACARS decoder. Today on YouTube, Pawel Janowski has posted a video showing how to download, compile and run the rtl_acars.c code on Linux.
Pawel has also posted the compilation instructions on his blog (in Polish but the console commands are easy to discern from the text).
On the Osmocom mailing list, Andreas has posted his work on a console based ACARS decoder for the RTL-SDR. Check out the mailing list thread here, and original post here. The second post on the thread shows how to compile it under Linux. Andreas writes
I have combined “rtl_fm” with Thierry Leconte’s (GPL’ed) acarsdec library code and created “rtl_acars” which can directly decode ACARS flight info messages to the console. Confirmed to compile on OSX 10.6 (not possible for me to check if it also compiles under Windows and *nix). Feel free to add it as another proof of concept to your distro unless you consider it too much of a quick&dirty hack.
Only the source code is available, and you will need to compile it yourself. The code can be found here.
Popular ADS-B decoding software for the RTL-SDR RTL1090 has updated it’s beta version to build 102. This new build has the following improvements
– Decoder improved by brute force 1-bit error correction and brute force DF11 and DF17 override for unknown DFs. This may be tough stuff for slow computers. If your computer slows down considerably return to a previous version please.
– Tabs introduced – List/Table selection moved to Tabs.
– Stats tab added: this brings back the previous status bar info about USB packets per second.
– II/SI tab added. This tab adds the ability to quickly scan the Mode-S interrogator codes around. A “radar1090.txt” file can be added to the rtl1090 folder that holds II/SI code decodings. A sample file is attached. The II/SI collection can be reset by a right mouse click action. The recently seen codes and the last aircraft responding with that code are display in red onwhite.
– Context menu (right mouse click) for text window, “listhold” established by menu selection, revoked by mouse click.
You can download the latest beta from http://rtl1090.com
Previously we showed a post on how John Wiseman was able to get ADS-B decoding with dump1090 running on his AR.Drone with an RTL-SDR stick so that he could track the locations of other aircraft. He has now gone further and implemented an Augmented Reality style ADS-B aircraft radar display on his AR.Drone. Check out the video he posted showing it in action below.
Rob from SonicGoose.com has put together a tutorial on how to use Globe-S RTL Edition with RTL1090. Globe-S is a light radar viewer (similar to Virtual Radar Server, ADSBScope etc) meant to interface with the popular ADS-B decoding software RTL1090.
See the tutorial here.
A new beta version of the RTL1090 ADS-B decoding software for the rtl-sdr has been released. Currently, it seems only the GUI has been improved, but the author plans on soon adding the following improvements
See the Yahoo Groups release post here for the full build change notes, and download the beta from their website here.
News Source – Radio Antics
