This was actually how I stumbled upon it. There was a helicopter with a camera gimbal and what appeared to be a radar pod of some sort circling my city. I wanted to see if it was related to our local dystopian-augmented-reality-aerial-imaging-startup and lo and behold, their similarly unlisted cessna caravan covered in camera and weapon pylons was flying nearby...

Tail number? That sounds like something interesting to watch!

N208CN

I wonder if that will change.

(If it can change? Probably yes...)

I did this a few months back and was pleased with the amount of traffic I could see, even with my amateur setup.

Yeah I tried it on my Windows PC a while back and could see dozens of planes within quite a large distance! Very cool to "watch" the planes - via direct radio reception - as they follow their route to the airport, etc. !!

I'm in the ORD flightpath. So cool to see thousands of airplanes every day.

Yeah I paid for FR24 and notice a lot of aircraft “flying under the radar” and aren’t marked. This is neat.

Does anyone know if it's possible to tee the data into multiple feeds? I'd like to feed to fr24 just for purposes of getting the better account, but also to this because the info is better. I could run two dongles i guess.

Yes, you can feed several places. My raspbian is feeding adsbexchange as well as flightaware, fr24, radarbox, planefinder and open sky network.

Sweet. I just googled everything at the end there and found this, look reasonable?: http://gordon.celesta.me/2018/04/13/raspberry-pi-real-time-f...

Skimming those instructions, they don't look bad. The github repo linked above is James' from adsbexchange, so between the two you should be set.

There's a nice script that will set up a bunch of feeders and run a web interface:

https://github.com/jprochazka/adsb-receiver

No. Do not use this buggy mess. Please!

It sounds like you know a lot about this topic, but can you please share what you know in a more informative way? Shallow dismissals and name-calling are against the site guidelines. We're trying for a different sort of discussion in which people can really learn from each other, instead of putting others or their work down.

If you wouldn't mind taking a look at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and posting in that spirit, we'd appreciate it. I'm sure HN readers have a lot to learn from you.

Just look at the code there. The author goes MIA and bugs are not fixed. There's really no reason to use it at this point - as there are better alternative and modern setups.

https://github.com/wiedehopf/adsb-wiki https://github.com/wiedehopf/adsb-scripts

https://github.com/mikenye/docker-adsbexchange https://github.com/mikenye

Much better. Thanks!

Yes, see ModeSMixer2

http://xdeco.org/?page_id=48

In my previous house, there were a large number of helicopters flying. Partly due to a tour company nearby. But the ADSB picked up very few of them.

I think in certain areas they have a different frequency for an ADSB equivalent.

Not a different frequency, just a different protocol. Mode-S doesn't transmit position information so location can't be easily determined unless several receivers collaborate.

My receiver was mainly setup for MLAT where no mode-s is usable. Its works fairly well, but at times adsbx has had very bad receivers sending faulty MLAT data corrupting all the nearby tracks. But it seems to work well for now.

Damn, this is probably the best idea I've seen all week (I have my pi zero with pi sugar and a eink display just sitting around doing nothing.

)