South Somerset Weather

Raspberry Pi Virtual Air Traffic Radar

This project uses a Raspberry Pi and a Mini Digital TV Stick to display live air traffic.

ADS-B signals from aircraft are received by the Pi and sent to a local PC running adsbSCOPE to dislay aircraft within range of the TV Stick receiver.

adsbSCOPE can be downloaded here.

A suitable TV Stick can be obtained from here.

Here is what is needed to get the Pi receiving ADS-B data and sending it to Windows PC on the same network.

Install the dependencies:

$ sudo apt-get install git
$ sudo apt-get install cmake
$ sudo apt-get install libusb-1.0-0.dev
$ sudo apt-get install build-essential

Install the drivers:

$ git clone git://git.osmocom.org/rtl-sdr.git
$ cd rtl-sdr/
$ mkdir build
$ cd build
$ cmake ../
$ make
$ sudo make install
$ sudo ldconfig

Copy the rules file:

$ sudo cp /home/pi/rtl-sdr/rtl-sdr.rules /etc/udev/rules.d

Plug in the TV stick and issue the rtl_test -t command to make sure the Raspberry Pi is seeing the stick.

When the Raspberry detects the device, start the rtl server using:

$ rtl_adsb |netcat -lp 30003

On the client machine (e.g.Windows PC), install adsbSCOPE and configure it to listen to the ADS-B data from the Pi (you will need to put the IP address of your Pi into the URL section), as shown below (Other --> Network --> Network Setup):