Hak5: Improvements to the ADS-B Antenna Drone

Previously we posted about the Hak5 teams attempt to create an ADS-B quadcopter receiver which carried a coax collinear antenna, ran the ADS-B decoder dump1090 on board and then transmitted the decoded ADS-B data back to a laptop on the ground via WiFi. Their results were poor due to various factors.

In the latest video they read comments from fans which explain why they had such poor results, then apply some of those recommendations to a second experiment. Previously they had trouble keeping the WiFi connection alive due to poor reception, so now they use a WiFi Yagi to boost the signal strength. They also reduced the number of elements on their coax collinear antenna and moved away from the broadcast RF transmitter that they were near in their last video.

There isn’t a big increase in the number of planes picked up in the second experiment but it was much more successful compared to the first.