Combining Multiple RTL-SDRs for Improved ADS-B Reception

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.

Combining Multiple ADSB Receivers

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.

nearairport

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.

Subscribe
Notify of
guest

1 Comment
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments