ADS-B, or how to track airplanes overhead
Why? How?
What do you need?
- Raspberry Pi
- A 1090mhz SDR dongle (I recommend the FlightAware stick, as it comes with built in filtering and isolation)
- An antenna. The FlightAware vertical is a superb choice, but I believe availability is few and far between. You can also build your own.
- (optional) Docker on your Raspberry Pi
- (optional) a weatherproof box, PoE adapter to micro-USB for remote power.
Setting Up A Station
It used to be that one would install dump1090-mutability for ultimate flexibility. Then there was the adsb-receiver project which installed multiple feeders, all scripted for you. Both projects have fizzled, and FlightAware's PiAware image has done a great job of continuing on with the mutability build of dump1090. It is by far the easiest installation to do.
Managing the software
RadarBox
MLAT
MLAT is set up in Radarbox by installing mlat-client from the radarbox repo that is added when you installed the feeder. You will also need to add your coordinates via the website station page, or by /etc/rbfeeder.ini. The format is:
lat=xx.xxxxxx lon=xx.xxxxxx
Now, the quirk with the mlat-client is that the rbfeeder app does not hook into it when using systemctl to restart. It will however start up correctly with a reboot. This can probably be fixed in the systemd file, so that the mlat-client starts up with rbfeeder correctly. Otherwise, you will not have MLAT. Once set up correctly, look at your station page, and it will show if MLAT is enabled.