ADSB - Flight Tracking - Quick Links

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 1. Introduction





I am currently running ADSB tracking software on a Raspberry Pi in my home office. This is connected to a dedicated antenna and feeds into a number of flight tracking services.

All data is received direct from the aircraft and fed into the services such as FlightRadar24 and ADSB Exchange.

At present, coverage broadly extends to Northumberland, over to Cumbria and down to Liverpool and North Yorkshire. There is also some coverage out into the North Sea.

Below are some links to the system, mainly posted here for reference purposes.

2. Links

We have a couple of options to view the live feed of aircraft in range of the antenna here (typically about 100 miles but varies in some directions). Whichever is selected, the data is the same but the different views are more about personal preference.

Personally, I prefer the third option - which provides a clearer view of the flights and associated data.

2.1 Live Feeds

Live View 1




Live View 2




Live View 3




2.2 Historic Data

Air traffic ebbs and flows over the course of the day, quite often, later at night, there is little traffic to see. However, the system logs tracked flights over the course of the previous 24 hours and can be viewed as a replay or simply as the tracks of the flights that were captured.

Time-lapse (last 24 hours) - I recommend setting this to 400x speed then hitting adjust, also, clicking the "show all tracks" button at the top of the screen.



Aircraft Tracks - This will show tracks of aircraft as seen by the receiver in the last 24 hours. Each track can be clicked to find out more about the aircraft and when it was seen.




2.3 Statistics

The system has been setup to capture statistics on data received and system performance. Graphs include the number of aircraft tracked, messages received, signal strength and others. For those interested in a few numbers, the link is here.





3. The System

For anyone interested, this system runs on a Raspberry Pi 4 with an RTL SDR 3 Software Defined Radio with this dedicated ADSB antenna. 

Edit 25/11/2023:

The RTL SDR is a decent all-round SDR but signal gains can be achieved by using a dedicated, specially designed ADSB SDR receiver.

Have now added a FlightAware Pro Stick Plus to the setup. This has drastically improved the number of messages and aircraft received by the system. Perhaps most effectively demonstrated by this graph, showing message rate per second over the course of Mon - Sat this week.

Comparing the message rate for Friday with the first few days of the week shows the difference this receiver has brought about.




The system runs the FlightRadar24 Pi24 image on a 32GB SD card. The following additional packages have been installed:

Data feeds are supplied from this system to:


Aircraft tracking typically uses ADSB which is a series of messages broadcast by an aircraft indicating its callsign, location, altitude and other data. However, sometimes aircraft do not broadcast their location, so these systems can also use a technique called MLAT. 

The short version is: If you have a number of receivers in different locations tracking the aircraft, you can establish, with some accuracy, its location, direction and altitude simply by calculating the difference in the time the signal arrived at each location.

In these systems, a location feeding data needs to link up with a number of "peers" who also see the aircraft. This is dynamic (changes continuously) and very effective. The following show peer links for this system.


4. Next Steps

Having got this up and running and made some improvements to signal quality, message rates and range, I need to think about how to site this antenna up high - above my roof. Access is problematic but range would be markedly increased.

At this point i'm considering getting an installer in to come and fit this on a pole at the highest point on the house - this should clear most, if not all local obstructions and likely bring about a dramatic increase in range.



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