Tracking Aircraft Using the RTL SDR Dongle

if you watch my video on getting started with software-defined radio using the rtl-sdr dongle you'll remember I mentioned we to a video on tracking aircraft using the RTL SDR well this is it [Music] [Music] nowadays aircraft broadcast quite a bit of data about themselves as they fly along you may remember after a tragic aircraft loss Boeing was able to tell investigators that the engines of the aircraft were running fine as they received reports directly from that aircraft system as the aircraft flew long anti-collision systems also broadcast information that provide pilots with avoidance inputs in this case we'll be looking at something called the automatic dependent surveillance broadcast mode s transponder this system broadcasts important aircraft information to air traffic controllers we'll be using our SDR dongle a computer an appropriate antenna a data decoder program and a web provided mapping interface to see the aircraft flying within reach of our antenna it's really pretty cool first we'll assume that you have your RTL SDR dongle and have used it with one of the software processors such as SDR sharp the next thing you'll need is an antenna that receives on the frequency used by the a DSP system that frequency is 1090 megahertz if you're a ham radio operator you remember the formula to compute the length of a dipole antenna to compute the length you divide the number 468 by the frequency in megahertz so in this case we'll divide 468 by 1090 to get the length in feet that is 0.4 to 9 feet to convert that into inches we'll multiply it by 12 resulting in 5.15 inches overall since we'll be using a dipole antenna each leg will be 2.5 7 inches long if you prefer to work in metric measures multiply the 2.57 by 25.2 to get millimeters in this case sixty four point seven millimeters or 6.5 centimeters per dipole leg the rtl-sdr website has some examples of homemade antennas for this application you can also take a short piece of coax with the proper SMA connector on one end and easily make a dipole for this frequency simply remove the outer and inner insulation and expose just over 6.5 centimeters of the conductor and the braid roll the braid back along the coax resulting in two legs of 6.5 centimeters and cover it all with some electrical tape the easy way to get an appropriate antenna is to have purchased the rtl-sdr dongle set that includes the antenna kit or to have purchased the antenna kit separately use the short antenna arms that come with the antenna kit and you're good to go now that we're able to receive the signals we need to be able to decode the signals for this demo we're going to use a program described on the RTL SDR website it's called dump 1090 it's not a very glamorous name but it does what's required the other thing we'll need to do is install a second piece of software called a virtual radar server this software calls Google Maps and then displays the information from the dump 1090 program over the map there are good installation instructions on the rtl-sdr website and I'll link to the ad SB tutorial page on that site in the description below this video what we will do here is start from the installed state and give you a quick peek at what you'll be able to do when you have the tools installed on your computer now before we jump in I need to mention that these programs are free and supported by users they've also been around a while that means that like the SDR sharp software you'll be installing these from bat files and may need to use the Zeitung program to ensure you have the right RTL drivers loaded the installation instructions cover this well just understand it's not the automated installed processes newer commercial software uses now before we leave let me remind you that when installing from a bat file install might not be exactly the right word it's it's more like running the software the installation doesn't include a lot of links to the Windows registry so the bat file just runs these various software so that you're able to use them so let's get started so one of the first things you're gonna want to do is when you download the dump ten-ninety file it's a zip file so you'll want to extract it into a folder and so I've done that into a double 10/90 folder in the My Documents section of my computer and in this case when I go about installing this I'm simply going to double click on this dump 10/90 bat file it will execute a number of commands to install the dump ten-ninety program onto my computer the other thing I did just for my own convenience is I created a dump 1090 that shortcut that I can keep on my desktop so I can open it without digging around in my directory in my Windows File Explorer to get to the bat file to get the dump 10:19 running the other piece of software that you'll need to download is the virtual radar set up and it's just a single executable as you can see it's not a very big file and again I put that moved it from my downloads file to a file in in a folder where I keep some ham radio related things and so to start the virtual radar setup you just double-click this and then I'll get that all installed and again I used a shortcut to put that on my computer's desktop to make it easy for me to get to it so let's take a look at what those particular programs look like now ok so here is the dump 1090 output the program is running in a command window it's the information that's coming from that little antenna on my bookshelf through the SDR dong go into the computer now this information is not particularly interesting or useful in this format to the typical user and to be able to see what this actually means we need to put it into the virtual radar server which I've got running underneath this so let's add the map overlay or in this case underlay to this information and show you what it looks like now when you open the virtual radar server application by double-clicking on that executable or on the shortcut that you might have made you're gonna see a couple of things the first thing you're gonna want to do is go into tools and we're gonna do a couple of setup things so first we're gonna go to options we're going to go to receivers up here near the top and it's going to give us some information about our receiver now to make this easy they've got a wizard so we're going to click the wizard and it's going to ask us some important questions so what do we want to connect to well a software-defined radio what decoder program are we're using we're doing dump 1090 so we've selected that is it running on this computer yes it is and then click finish to make the changes or if you're doing your orders for an initial setup to get it ready to go now I've already had this configured so I'm going to cancel but you would click finish so with this done then we could press test the connection message comes up and says the connection can be made with these settings so in other words it's seeing the dump 1090 and it's seeing the SDR and so next then we can click on okay down here get out of this particular option now with that complete you can see that the receiver is connected it's tracking 51 airplanes it's collected 38,000 messages and some of this other information is available for you the IP address of that virtual server and so forth so the next thing we are going to do is we are going to open our browser using this link right here to display that map information so here we are with the information broadcast from the various aircraft through the dump 1090 displayed on the map in the virtual radar server now this is set up near where I live and this is of course where the signals are going to be coming from when you start yours for the first time you're gonna want to start up here menu because it's likely that the map is not going to open up where you are so start with menu I'm going to go to options we're going to go to general and then you're going to click on set the current location and that will redisplay the map with a little typical map pin icon and you can either put in your GPS location or you can drag the map underneath the pin and specify where you are that way and so that then you will have have set the location of where you are now after you've made that change you're going to come back here and uncheck the set current location so that the software knows to begin the map process at this location next time now there are a couple of other things here and that includes the various units that of things that you're gonna want to use so I've got nautical miles and height and feet and speed and knots barometric pressure and inches of mercury and so forth typical measures for the United States where you live it may be different when we go up to map we're gonna make some changes here - or at least review what's selected and so I want to hato select the closest aircraft on altitude I can make changes based on distance if I'd prefer I can just set the distance in our range circles in the map display and the number of circles that's right here and some colors and that kind of thing when I come to aircraft this is another important eye item for me to set and that on my aircraft I can set three label lines and so I've got it set for the callsign in the first one the altitude in the second and the registration in the third so if you can look down here you can see this is an American Airlines flight 17 o - it's at 6,900 feet so it's probably coming into Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport and the tail number is November seven five zero uniform whiskey so that's the information about that airplane up here is a private airplane and the callsign and the registration are essentially the same he's at 7700 feet and he's probably just out out maneuvering enjoying a nice afternoon there are a lot of things that you can choose from and so you can play around with these in the options menu and then in the map or the aircraft tab to give you a display that shows you the things that you are interested in so we'll leave the options right now and here then we can see that we have the display we can use our scroll wheel on our mouse to go in or out and then we can just drag the map to the left or right using the mouse button pretty much the same way as you would use with Google Maps now at this point we're about from where I am where my antenna is down to things Sky Harbor it's about 25 miles and so you can see I've got some pretty good range from this this little tiny antenna here on my bookshelf here is a airplane that just dropped out he was out there you know around 50 miles this little airplane is out there and if I click on him I can see what he's been doing so he's just been doing circles and so forth his information comes up over here so it's a private airplane it's a 71 72 sky Hawk he's at 8500 feet his vertical speed and all that other information is shown for him right there so on this airplane we've got we can click on him and it's the United Airline flight 2071 he's at flight level 380 row his tail number is November 3 8 7 to 7 we clicked on in and we get this information over here so we got a picture of that kind of airplane he's at 38,000 feet light level 3 8 0 he took off from mahom Houston Intercontinental Airport and he is going to San Jose so there's a lot of information available to you as you look at these this little this little airplane here is a private airplane his tail numbers November to 134 Mike he's at 4,500 feet he hasn't doesn't have a flight plan filed you would expect that right there because this is a very busy general aviation Airport where they do a lot of maneuvering practice and touch and goes and that kind of thing and they might be part of one of the flight schools that are located there so this is the virtual radar display you can see that we can get some pretty good range even out of a little antenna and you can have a chance to zoom in on and learn about the airplanes that are coming in and out of the area where you happen to find yourself so as you've seen tracking aircraft near you is pretty cool and the dump 1090 program does a good job of feeding raw data to the virtual radar server to provide you with the display you also saw that the virtual radar server gives you some options to modify your display including what aircraft information you want to display now before you tell me that there are smartphone apps that do the same thing yeah I know in fact I use one with waiting in an airport parking lot for someone to arrive or even in the back yard to just check on who's flying over using the RTL SDR receiver and this software is not only to see the data on the nearby planes but also to gain some understanding of another aspect of software-defined radio in my mind apps are about the destination and hobbies are about the journey hey if you found this video helpful please click on the thumbs up button below the video and subscribe to the gadget talk channel click the Bell icon to be notified when I post new videos thanks for watching [Music] [Music]

Channel: Gadget Talk

Views: 16,270

Keywords: RTL SDR, SDR, Software Defined Radio, ADSB, aircraft tracking, tracking, airplane

Id: o1KhiKV-8z4

Length: 17min 39sec (1059 seconds)

Published: Mon May 18 2020