ADS-B Receiver and Plotter with Arch Linux
I love aviation and love software defined radios so building an ADS-B receiver and plotter was high on the lists of to-do. In Standish Michigan there are not a lot of fly overs so I wanted to be sure to capture those that happened. Haven seen now a few A-10’s on low pass it only fueled that desire :)
I use yaourt for my AUR package management, but whatever tool you use should be capable.
- yaourt dump1090-robb
- Plugin the RTLSDR Dongle. I use a cheap dongle off Ebay with the following lsusb dump: Bus 003 Device 006: ID 0bda:2838 Realtek Semiconductor Corp. RTL2838 DVB-T
- As a standard user enter into a terminal _dump1090 _and make sure that the software can use the RTLSDR device and begin plotting information. If you cannot see this text you will need to troubleshoot your device. You can try running with _sudo dump1090 _to decide if this is a permissions issue quickly
- After verifying you can use the dongle we will now run dump1090 in an interactive and web server mode with the following command. Note that I run dump1090 on port 7070 instead of the default 8080 as I already have something occupying that port: dump1090 –net-http-port 7070 –interactive –net –phase-enhance –aggressive
- Open a web browser and enter http://127.0.0.1:7070 and compare the live updates in the terminal with the plotting. You should see ADS-B hits.
I have done all my captures thus far on the included DVB-T antenna and it works pretty well. As I am on the road I am not near the home lab to produce a better antenna.
