Plane✈/Sailing⛵
“Plane/Sailing” is the name given to my home aircraft and ship tracker. It receives ADS-B and AIS signals via antennas on my house, processes them to share with popular tracking websites, and displays the combined results on a website for the world to see.
If you’d like to see what I’m currently tracking, check out https://planesailing.ianrenton.com!
Build Guide
The links below are to the design & build information in case you are interested or would like to build a similar setup for yourself! All the software is open source, and all the hardware chosen to be as inexpensive as possible.
- System Architecture
- Antenna & Receiver Choices
- Raspberry Pis & Processing Software
- Web Front-End
- Bill of Materials
You may also want to check out this project’s predecessor, my first flight tracker.
Future Plans
- APRS Integration
- Address some design weaknesses, principally the following points, by writing my own back-end server.
- There is no consistency between data types currently - ADS-B data is fetched using JSON and AIS using KML, all tied into the out-of-the-box functionality of Dump1090 and AIS Dispatcher
- It is very dependent on things that may change, e.g. an automatic update of Dump1090 may revert my web server config, and the next version of AIS Dispatcher is known to be removing the KML functionality
- The web server reverse proxy setup is ugly.
Comments
what bout high end desktop computers? 8+ cpu systems should be able to do the work f way ore than raspPi computers right?
Oh, definitely. N7IPB here for example has four RTL-SDR dongles attached to a single PC in order to capture more ADS-B and AIS channels simultaneously. Even a modern Raspberry Pi 4 could cope with two at the same time - the only reason I use two separate RPis is because I wanted to use up the old models I had lying around.
This project looks VERY interesting! Would it be possible to add in the ability to listen to Marine VHF channels?
Hi James, thanks for your interest! Unfortunately I can’t add the ability to listen to marine VHF channels for a weird reason - it may be illegal! This is the same reason that sites like LiveATC don’t include air traffic control radio feeds for the UK.
If you’re interested in replicating this for yourself and including the ability to listen to marine VHF, here are some hints that you may wish to use at your discretion…
A standard RTL-SDR has a bandwidth of 2MHz, with AIS channel B up at 162.025 MHz. This means a single RTL-SDR will only be able to hear marine VHF channels over 160MHz. This covers the upper half of the duplex channels but not the lower half, and not the simplex channels such as 16 that you might be interested in. For that, you’d need a second RTL-SDR, or a receiver with a higher bandwidth (e.g. HackRF with 10MHz).
There are a variety of ways of getting SDR audio onto the web. WebSDR is an option but it is closed source and only available to people who make their stream available on
websdr.orgitself. YouSDR doesn’t come with any restrictions so may be a better choice, it may a bit tricky to set up but the README does include full instructions. Then there are more “DIY” options such as using a combination of rtl_fm, ezstream, IceCast and rtl_fm_python.If you have any questions or get stuck I’d be happy to help, but as I say unfortunately I can’t offer this myself as part of Plane/Sailing.