dump1090

I used to have fun tracking flights over my previous home using a little usb rtl-sdr antenna attached to a raspberry pi and leveraging the dump1090 software. I moved homes, and got too lazy to re-set things up...but that dump1090 software did the trick back then. Its been a few years, so there could be better software nowadays. dump1090 was a bit of work to do the initial software setup, but thereafter was easy. The 2 versions that i recall back in the day... https://github.com/antirez/dump1090 (original i think?) https://github.com/MalcolmRobb/dump1090 (the form?) Have fun!

Yes. A cheap DVB-T dongle supported by RTL-SDR along with https://github.com/MalcolmRobb/dump1090 or similar will allow this, but bear in mind that something like this should really not be used in any situation where flight safety depends on it.

Indeed - the power of OSS! The two forks I've followed have been https://github.com/MalcolmRobb/dump1090 and https://github.com/mutability/dump1090 but both are of course supported by contributions from a wide range of people making little tweaks to scratch their own itch!

I wish the article had a bit more technical details about the failover system used. What's interesting is, although nowhere near useful enough to organize rapid aircraft landing, one could purchase a cheap ($10) Software Defined Radio and use something like Dump1090[1] to view all local planes. I imagine they still had some sort of capability close to this while their machines were 'offline'. [1] https://github.com/MalcolmRobb/dump1090

I captured ADS-B packets from a U-2 in the LAX area (using an RTL-SDR dongle) on 2013-06-18. If you want to see them for yourself, the decoded packets (hex) are at https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/7443278/Mode%20S%20Captu... (along with other aircraft). The U-2 I picked up is ICAO ae094b, registration 68-10336[1]. You can decode the packet information using dump1090[2]: ./dump1090 --net-only > out.txt Then in another terminal: cat mode-s-capture-2013-06-18.raw | nc localhost 30001 Then in out.text, look for "ae094b". You'll see packets like *0206042b1365a5; CRC: ae094b (ok) DF 0: Short Air-Air Surveillance. VS : Airborne CC : 1 SL : 0 Altitude : 60000 feet ICAO Address : ae094b [1] http://www.airliners.net/search/photo.search?regsearch=68-10... [2] https:/