SDR Based Flight Tracking

I recently had the need to track the arrival of a flight into the airport near my house.  Of course, I could use any of the online services available for this, but being a HAM radio operator, I wanted to track this data myself.  I discovered that with a $30 RTL-SDR dongle, this can easily be done.

First, I built a co-linear antenna for this.  This is a simple antenna made by connecting stub pieces of coax together.  I opted for a 4 element co-linear which is not the best configuration.  I will at some time build an 8 element and place it within a PVC pipe.  This is just a proof of concept.

Using the plans here https://www.balarad.net/ I made a 4 element antenna.

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 I fed this into my home TV antenna wiring using an off the shelf satellite diplexer.

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This is then carried on quad shield RG6 to the SDR receiver in the other room.

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For this project I used the open source software ADSBox which can be downloaded here: http://diseqc.alh.org.ua/projects/hard/adsb/

Since the site is in Russian here is how I built the program.  Download the adsbox current version (very bottom of page) and extract it to a folder called adsbox.  In the same root directory as adsbox (not within the adsbox folder) download and extract sqlite3 amalgamation (current version worked fine).

Edit the Makefile and set “WITH_RTLSDR = yes”.  You can then compile and run adsbox.

Once up and running the application looks like this.  You can see a “flight board” showing each airplane your software has decoded.

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Or, if you’d rather, you can click on GMap and see this data overlayed on the Google Maps interface.

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Very neat program!