I recently gave a presentation on Software Defined Radio (SDR) at my hackerspace in Chicago, Pumping Station: One. I've attached the slides to this blog post for reference. After the talk, someone told me they had seen a program that maps out airplanes flying in one's area based on data received via Automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B) on 1090 MHz. After a search, I found dump1090 which works with cheap DVB-T USB sticks with certain Realtek chipsets thanks to the rtl-sdr library
dump1090 by Salvatore Sanfilippo
https://github.com/antirez/dump1090
a simple Mode S decoder for RTLSDR devices
Here is how I built rtl-sdr on BeagleBone Black which is running Angstrom on eMMC:
opkg update
opkg install libusb-1.0-dev
git clone git://git.osmocom.org/rtl-sdr.git
I have further details of installation process in this GitHub Gist:
https://gist.github.com/pdp7/5503462
After installing, test if the USB adapter is recognized:
root@beaglebone:~# rtl_eeprom
Found 1 device(s):
0: Generic RTL2832U OEM
Using device 0: Generic RTL2832U
OEM
Found Rafael Micro R820T tuner
Here is how I installed dump1090:
git clone git://github.com/antirez/dump1090
cd dump1090/
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig/
make
Next edit the html for the web interface so that your location is displayed on the map:
vi gmap.html
To the program:
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH="/usr/local/lib/:${LD_LIBRARY_PATH}"
./dump1090 --interactive --net
You will then see ADS-B data start to fill the screen assuming you are nearby any flights. I live in Chicago near O'Hare so I see a lot of traffic:
dump1090 also runs a web server on port 8080 which displays the flights atop Google Maps:
You can find out more details for each individual flight from websites like http://flightradar24.com/:
Here is a video of my setup in action:
Watching airplanes with Adafruit SDR on BeagleBone
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l65sBZ25be4
Cheers,
Drew
| nerp-sdr-20140331.pdf |
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