Personal Air Traffic Control

Last year was a long delivery march at work for me and I had to drop many of the "fun" things I was doing. With that delivery in the rear view mirror I have been exploring some of the things I "bookmarked". Some of them are aviation related since I have a personal interest in the aviation field AND its related to my day job.

Turns out there are lots of ways that aircraft communicate with the ground and that ground uses to track aircraft - like radar and transponders. I have been digging into ADS-B which aircraft use to transmit basic data like GPS location, altitude and air speed. The interesting this is that ADS-B signals are transmitted "in the open" over VHF 1090 MHz.

Long story short - I setup my own receiving station using FlightAware PiAware. It's solution running on Raspberry Pi and a USB receiver that translates the raw radio signals to data. The whole thing is packaged up by FlightAware and they make it super simple to get it up and running.

I have been hacking around trying to get my own Python script to pull the data just to play; but it way more fun just to watch.