shuyuan-liu / adsb-plot

Produce simple images from recorded SBS-format ADS-B data

This repo has been archived. There probably won't be any significant development in the future.

adsb-plot

Plots the position and altitude information in SBS-1 format ADS-B messages into a pretty image. ADS-B signals can be received from aircraft using a software-defined radio, such as an RTL-SDR or Airspy, then decoded with dump1090 / readsb. Each pair of coordinates received is plotted as a pixel, with its colour representing altitude.

Currently the latitudes and longitudes are converted to x and y coordinates through a simple constant scaling, with no compensation for the Earth’s curvature. Effectively this means the tracks plotted by this program will appear more horizontally stretched at higher latitudes.

Compiling

• Install png++.
• git clone this repository.
• Install Tup and run tup in the cloned repo. Alternatively, run c++ --std=c++17 -O2 -lpng *.cpp -o adsb-plot.

My receiver setup for reference

  |  N Male - SMA Male +---------------+ 5 m RG-58 +------------+ USB Type-A to Type-C +--------+
 /|\===================| TQP3M9009 LNA |===========| RTL-SDR V3 |======================| Laptop |
                       +---------------+           +------------+                      +--------+

The antenna is a quarter wave ground plane antenna designed with M0UKD’s calculator, built with a chassis mount female N connector and 1.25 mm diameter copper wire. It hangs out from a second-floor window facing London Heathrow Airport. On the laptop, dump1090 processes the received ADS-B signals and netcat is used to extract the data from dump1090 in SBS-1 format:

• dump1090 --gain 25 --net --fix --metric
• nc localhost 30003 | tee --append adsb.csv

The image above was produced from 4.9 GiB of data recorded in IO91UB on and off over a week. You might be able to spot where London Heathrow and London Gatwick are!