Tagged: quadcopter

Hak5: ADS-B on a Quadcopter carrying a Wifi Enabled Linux Computer, RTL-SDR and Coaxial Collinear Antenna

Over on YouTube, Hak5 a electronics enthusiast channel has posted a video showing an interesting ADS-B project they undertook.

The Hak5 team took a quadcopter up on top of a high mountain, attached to it a WiFi Pineapple (a small WiFi equipped Linux computer), an RTL-SDR dongle and a coax collinear antenna and then flew it up high. They ran dump1090, a Linux based ADS-B decoder on the WiFi pineapple and then broadcast the decoded information back to a laptop on the ground.

Although the results were less than favourable, it is still an interesting project to explore. Their poor results may be due to a nearby RF broadcast tower which could have been overloading the dongle, or EMF from the quadcopter motors.

Tracking Aircraft over 300 miles away! Mountain + Drone + SDR, Hak5 1609

Update: RTL-SDR Running ADS-B on a Quadrocopter now with Augmented Reality Display

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.

AR.Drone with air traffic (ADS-B) overlaid on camera feed

AR Drone with Augmented Reality ADS-B using RTL-SDR