Every few minutes, an airplane flies over our family farm in Middle Tennessee. I wanted to know what was up there — so I built a system that tells me, in real time, exactly what aircraft is above my house. Pilot project = The best kind of fun!
A Raspberry Pi with an RTL-SDR radio dongle sits in my ham cabinet in the barn listening on 1090 MHz — the frequency every aircraft transponder broadcasts on. The software (dump1090) decodes these ADS-B signals into structured data: position, altitude, speed, heading, and a unique ICAO identifier for each aircraft.
On a typical day, the receiver tracks 60-100 aircraft simultaneously within about 100 miles. All of this data is served as a local JSON API that any script on my network can consume.
I feed the data to FlightAware's network, which earns a free Enterprise account ($90/month value) in exchange. The hardware cost was about $60 total — the Pi plus the SDR dongle.
The raw tracking is interesting on its own, but the real fun started when I built a geofence on top of it. More on that in a future post.
#ADSB #RaspberryPi #Aviation #HomeLab #FlightAware
— Continue reading at https://dizydiz.com/blog/adsb-aircraft-tracker.html