Viewing ADS-B data with an RTL-SDR and Xastir

I'm not sure where the idea came from, but at one point I thought it would be interesting to see what aircraft I could hear using an RTL-SDR dongle.

I found that FlightAware maintains a piece of software available in GitHub that is a simple Mode S decoder for RTL-SDR devices. This software is the successor to dump1090-mutability which is nicely available as a package available to the Raspberry Pi.

After installing the package, I found that I can run it like so:

#!/bin/bash

dump1090-mutability --interactive --net --net-sbs-port 30003 --phase-enhance --oversample --fix --ppm -1 --gain -10 --device-index 0

This started decoding packets and displaying information in the terminal about them.

I was surprised at just how many I could see with an indoor antenna. And I thought it might be nice to see them visually on a map.

I found that the software that I run every day for some of my Amateur Radio stuff, Xastir has a script written specifically to "convert" dump1090 output to APRS objects in Xastir - that was exactly what I needed.

In the scripts directory, I found the ads-b.pl script and ran it with the directions found in the file:

./ads-b.pl planes 1016

It began processing data...

And objects appeared on the map

I was surprised at how many airplanes were flying over and found it fun to watch.

I also found ADS-B Exchange - track aircraft live that let me view even more data online.

As I think is typical with the Amateur Radio hobby, this was a lot of fun to explore.