Make your own Air Traffic Control RADAR

Ever wondered where that plane high above your head was going? Ever wondered who the annoying little propellor plane belonged to that keeps doing Top Gun-esque fly-bys of your house? Wonder no more with your own Air Traffic Control RADAR system!


OK, not quite, but almost.

For this you'll need a USB SDR dongle. You can find them for about £10-£20 - look for something based on the Realtek RTL2832U chip. The other thing you'll need is some ADS-B decoding software - we'll be using dump1090 - but don't worry about that, we'll deal with that and more below.

ADS-B (Automatic Dependent Surveillance - Broadcast) is a clever system that allows the sharing of certain details about a flight.  Every aircraft (well, almost every) has a small AM transmitter that transmits certain information on 1090MHz - the following is from Wikipedia:

Using "ADS-B Out", each aircraft periodically broadcasts information about itself, such as identification, current position [from on-board GPS], altitude and velocity, through an onboard transmitter. ADS-B Out provides air traffic controllers with real-time position information that is, in most cases, more accurate than the information available with current radar-based systems.

Using our RTL2832U-based receiver set to 1090MHz and with a suitable aerial, some SDR software, some software to decode the ADS-B packets, and finally some software to draw it all on a map and make it look pretty we can create our own real-time RADAR screen! Sound daunting? It's easy as (raspberry) pi. We'll be installing everything bar the SDR stuff via some very nifty little scripts that automate the whole process written by some chap called Joe Prochazka.

Now, the following instructions and links are for installing on a Raspberry Pi.  I downloaded and ran the install.sh on my faithful old Dell Latitude E6400 which is running Ubuntu 18.04.2LTS, and it all installed and worked with minimal fiddling.

You can find the automated scripts at https://github.com/jprochazka/adsb-receiver.

There is a great step-by-step walk through at planefinder.net

Happy spotting!