How to track aircrafts using a TV usb stick and a Raspberry Pi

Nicolás Singh
Sep 2, 2018 · 3 min read
image by William Hook on Unsplash

It’s amazing to know that it’s possible to listen aircraft signals in your city for less than 60 bucks using a TV usb stick and a Raspberry Pi, and feed this data to flightradar24 — one of the most important sites to see live flight data in the world.

In my experience, using a 10 cm. antenna you can track aircrafts within a 100 kilometers radius, choosing the right position clear to the sky with no surroundings (like buildings or mountains).

Requirements

If you take a look at the instructions detailed on the official flightradar24 site, you only need two things to set this up:

(source: https://www.flightradar24.com/share-your-data)
  • A Raspberry Pi with an SD card (with wired or wireless connection).
  • An ADS-B USB dongle (TV tuner). You can find lots of them on Amazon or Ebay for around $20.

We recommend to use raspbian distribution to make things easier, since we’re going to use docker to set up the required software. To install docker, follow the instructions detailed on the official site:

sudo apt-get remove docker docker-engine docker.iosudo apt-get updatesudo apt-get install \
apt-transport-https \
ca-certificates \
curl \
gnupg2 \
software-properties-common
curl -fsSL https://download.docker.com/linux/debian/gpg | sudo apt-key add -echo "deb [arch=armhf] https://download.docker.com/linux/debian \
$(lsb_release -cs) stable" | \
sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/docker.list
sudo apt-get updatesudo apt-get install docker-ce -ysudo usermod -aG docker pi

First time run (get your sharing Key)

If this is the first time you set up your radar, you have to register the new device on flightradar24 (continue to the next section if you already have a sharing key).

To run the registration we can use an image published in docker hub:

docker run -it --rm nicosingh/rpi-fr24feed --signup

And follow the steps to register your email address and information about your radar. One of the steps here is to inform the coordinates of your antenna in the form of xx.xx (latitude), yy.yy (longitude). If you don’t know this information, you can search your coordinates at https://www.latlong.net/ or https://gps-coordinates.org/

After signing up, you’ll get a new sharing key to identify your new radar. It’s an hexadecimal string of 16 characters, and you should keep it saved in a safe place. If you lose it, you can recover it visiting your flightradar24 account: https://www.flightradar24.com/account/data-sharing

your flightradar24 radars

Run your radar

Now it’s time to start getting signals from the air, and feed them to flightradar24. Connect your ADS-B USB dongle to any of the raspberry pi USB ports, and run this command:

docker run -d --device=/dev/bus/usb -e FR24_KEY=xxyyzz --privileged nicosingh/rpi-fr24feed

Where FR24_KEY=xxyyzz should be replaced with the sharing Key of your radar. The options device and privileged are used to escalate privileges in docker to use our DVB-T usb stick.

That’s it!, now wait a few minutes to let flightradar24 software to register and calibrate your antenna, and you’ll be feeding live information to the world.

I hope this post helped you to set up your own radar, and feed aircraft information to one of the biggest aircraft tracking communities of these days.

If you find any issues or you have questions, please check out the source code and feel free to start new discussions/issues:

https://gitlab.com/nicosingh/rpi-fr24feed

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