ADS-B Scanner

Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast is a radio transmission on 1090 Mhz supported by most aircraft. A step-by-step guide to build a scanner using a Raspberry Pi and RTL-SDR.

Hardware

• Raspberry Pi 3 or above

• RTL-SDR / DVB-T stick

Software

Use PiBakery to build a Raspbian full image written to SDHC card with VNC enabled and WiFi configured. Follow the commands in the code snippet below to configure software on the Raspberry Pi.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install cmake build-essential python-pip libusb-1.0-0-dev python-numpy git pandoc
cd ~ 
git clone git://git.osmocom.org/rtl-sdr.git 
cd rtl-sdr 
mkdir build 
cd build 
cmake ../ -DINSTALL_UDEV_RULES=ON -DDETACH_KERNEL_DRIVER=ON make sudo make install 
sudo ldconfig
cd ~
git clone git://github.com/MalcolmRobb/dump1090.git
cd dump1090
make
sudo ./dump1090 --quiet --net

The last command above starts the dump1090 server. Make the following change to add Google maps API key.

<script type="text/javascript" src="https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/js?key=GOOGLE_MAPS_API_KEY&sensor=false&amp;libraries=geometry"></script>

http://raspberrypi:8080 shows a map with aircraft highlighted. http://raspberrypi:8080/data.json provides JSON output of the same data. Replace raspberrypi in the urls with ip adress or hostname of the raspberry pi.