ADSB with a Dongle

[Dr. O]

http://g4vxe.blogspot.com/2012/12/virtual-radar-for-tenner-rtlsdr-and.html

I post this for those with a curious bent. These are radio/scanner enthusiasts in Britain who are displaying ADSB data from aircraft on their PC using a hardware tuner (dongle) that costs roughly $15 and some free software, that acts like a virtual radar screen.

Perhaps, one or two on here will find this of interest to try. I probably won't as I have more than enough electronic projects to keep me off street corners and out of the bar.

 

[flyingron]

It's more involved than that actually. The individual hobbiest receive sites are networking together to give a coverage mosaic of the entire country. There's nothing tremendously elaborate about the datalink. The entire lack of security is going to be quite interesting when we start relying on it.

 

[Art VanDelay]

Sometimes my dongle just seems to have a mind of it's own....

 

[zaitcev]

There's a bit more than meets the eye to this. For example, you need a dongle that does not have an L-band lockout in its tuner. I have one with E4000 tuner, and it does have the gap. I have an R820 based dongle on order. And of course they do not cost $15 really, unless you luck upon one at DealExtreme. More like $35. Finally, the cheap ARM boards may be too slow to run the software, even if they can fetch the I/Q samples.

My ultimate objective is to pair this with a GPS and a display, and cobble together a DIY TIS-B IN (isn't Experimental great?). But it may be harder than it looks, because of UAT.

The UAT is always ouside of the lock-out band for these dongles, but it is a much higher data rate protocol than 1090ES. Decoding wide-band FSK is a pain. Its frame structure is also complex. So far I haven't succeeded in getting anything.