Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “SDR Plane Tracker”.
Software-Defined radios are gaining in popularity and it’s not hard to see why they are cheap and using them. Your computer can tune into an enormous range of frequencies, including FM radio, unencrypted police and fire bands, aircraft, transponders and even digital TV. With an inexpensive, rtl-sdr, USB dongle and properly configured software, you can track commercial airplane flights and output their location to mapping software. In this weekend, project will do just that and do it using a very affordable single board. Computer, the BeagleBone black you’ll need the following parts to build this project and the only tools you will need are a computer to configure the BeagleBone and the software or run start by plugging in the SDR dongle, the ethernet cable and the USB cable to power. The BeagleBone black connect to the Beagle over ssh.
If you are on a Windows computer, you may need to download putty. A free, SSH client then be sure to update your Beagle bone and then verify that your radio is connected to the board. Using the LS USB command debian doesn’t include a compiled package for the software-defined radio, so we’ll need to build one from the source code. We’Ll start by installing C make a compiler favored by a number of open source projects, we’ll install a few additional USB libraries and then clone the mapping. Software source code repository configure the source and then compile away next, we’ll need to build the software to do our plain tracking dump 1090 grab the source from the repo and compile it for fun, run, dump 1090 from the console window and watch the screen get flooded With data, this is all the raw data being intercepted by the software-defined radio close out of the program and, let’s find a better way to visualize. The data run dump 1090 again, but this time in interactive mode with the web interface running on port 8081, then launch a web browser on your computer and connect to the beaglebones web interface on port 8081. From here you can see a marker for each airborne plane plot it on a Google map clicking on each marker, reveals information about current longitude latitude and airspeed.
That’S it! Your BeagleBone is now tracking every aircraft it can find in your local air space. Since the project is open source, you can adapt it or take it further, like Malcolm Rob’s hack, which shows the planes flight path and offers a dark map option. What will you do with this project? Let us know in the comments below you: .