If you’ve ever looked up at a plane and wondered where it’s headed, this simple project is for you. Thanks to cheap, miniaturized electronics, you can now build a receiver that connects to your smartphone and shows details about all the aircraft in the sky around you. It takes less than an hour and costs about $115.
The device receives and decodes ADS-B, a data broadcast from aircraft that transmits a callsign, location, altitude, speed and a few other bits of information. If you live near an airport or under a flight path, there’s a good chance you can receive these transmissions easily.
A commercial ADS-B receiver can cost $1,000, but the Stratux project receiver we’re building uses a Raspberry Pi 3, the low-cost mini computer that’s become the basis for hundreds of electronics projects.
ADS-B transmits on two frequencies, 978MHz and 1090MHz, so we’ll need two radios. We can repurpose a couple of digital TV dongles as wideband software defined radios to pick up the broadcasts. A couple of antennas finishes off the radio portion. The Stratux page has the shopping list.
Decoding software can be downloaded from the project website and installed onto a MicroSD card, which is inserted into the Raspberry Pi.
And that’s about it. It really is plug-and-play construction. The parts cost a total of $115. A GPS dongle is optional and only needed if your phone or tablet doesn’t have built-in GPS.
The Raspberry Pi connects to your phone or tablet over WiFi and there are several pieces of software that will make sense of the signals and show planes on a map. In our tests, we used FltPlan, which was free through Apple’s App Store. We downloaded detailed maps for our area through the app.
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Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit! Be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Adafruit has the largest and best selection of Raspberry Pi accessories and all the code & tutorials to get you up and running in no time!