How to create a base station on a Raspberry Pi to track plane traffic



Brian Christner, an engineer who says 'there is a passion for airplanes from pores,' has done a project called 'Create a base station at hand with Raspberry Pi and track airplanes flying overhead.' .. Christner, who did a similar project in 2017, has disclosed how to do it, saying that the work has become surprisingly easy in three years.

How to Monitor Airplane Traffic with a Raspberry Pi
https://brianchristner.io/monitor-airplane-traffic-with-a-raspberry-pi/



Airplanes use satellites to locate themselves, which are transmitted as unencrypted signals called ADS-B. By receiving this signal, the radar on the ground can grasp the position where each airplane is flying, and it becomes possible to guide the airplane.

Christner used FlightAware 's information, which provides flight information around the world, to track planes. FlightAware is the world's largest aviation tracking data platform, collecting flight information and indicators, visualizing them as flight tracking maps, and delivering them live. FlightAware collects data from air traffic control and crowdsources information, and has released open software ' PiAware ' that receives ADS-B that broadcasts the latitude and altitude of airplanes. This time, Christner has done a project to track planes around the world using Pi Aware and Raspberry Pi.

Specifically, 'I created a FlightAware base station on my Raspberry Pi, collected ADS-B data, and sent it to FlightAware for visualization,' Christner said. He ran PiAware on a Raspberry Pi and used a USB TV tuner to record ADS-B signals.

FlightAware has published a self-made method for ADS-B receivers, and a list of necessary parts is summarized below.

PiAware --Let's make your own ADS-B receiver that can be a member of FlightAware --FlightAware
https://ja.flightaware.com/adsb/piaware/build



The main parts are a Raspberry Pi, a small antenna, and a DVB-T USB-type TV tuner, and the required budget is about $ 45 (about 4700 yen). If you make the antenna and TV tuner expensive, the budget will be about 20 to 40 dollars (about 2100 to 4200 yen), but it seems that the range of received data will be expanded. The base stations actually created by Mr. Christner are as follows.



The process is as follows.

1: Download the PiAware image file
2: Copy the file to SD card
3: Set up the Raspberry Pi Headless for Wi-Fi connection
4: Start Raspberry Pi and connect to IP
5: Connect to your FlightAware account
6: Start recording airplane traffic

With the above process, you can create a base station at your own hands and track airplanes flying overhead. The collected data is visualized as follows.

Brian Christner ADS-B Feeder Statistics --FlightAware
https://ja.flightaware.com/adsb/stats/user/vegasbrianc



In addition, Mr. Christner seems to have done a project to monitor airplane traffic with Raspberry Pi in 2017, but in the 2017 project, it is an image with Docker that develops, deploys and executes applications using container virtualization. It was necessary to create a file, work with the USB tuner, collected data, and the Docker container to work together, 'it was fun but it took too long'. However, since 2017, there has been a big evolution in PiAware, and a pre-created Raspberry Pi image file is prepared with necessary drivers etc., and the work can be completed just by copying PiAware to the SD card. It seems to be.

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in Hardware,   Ride, Posted by darkhorse_log