Tracking Planes Above Your House with ADS-B
Sky Sleuth
© Lead Image © Oleksiy Tsupe, 123RF.com
Curious about the planes that fly over your home? With some simple and affordable equipment, you can receive their ADS-B signals and uncover detailed flight information.
If a plane is flying above your house, do you ever wonder about its origin and destination? While there are many websites that provide this information (see Figure 1 for an example), you don't actually need them. In many countries around the world, various aircraft types (primarily commercial passenger carriers) are required to be equipped with an Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) transmitter. ADS-B provides air traffic controllers with more information about the aircraft than what radar can offer. With a simple antenna and an RTL-SDR USB dongle, anyone can capture these signals and process them on a computer.
Figure 1: Planes are tracked on various websites, such as airplanes.live.
ADS-B works automatically, broadcasting the flight state periodically without input from the pilot or air traffic controller. Typically, the aircraft transmits its position, altitude, and speed, along with its call sign for identification. This is how those websites are able to show you planes on a map: They use data from a network of computers equipped with an ADS-B receiver, which is then visualized and supplemented with external data. For more in-depth details about ADS-B and decoding signals, consider reading The 1090 Megahertz Riddle [1], which you can download for free.
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