adsb-exchange VS dump1090

Nice photo! Don’t pay attention to some of the overzealous skeptics. If your friend can provide time/place, you can double check https://www.adsbexchange.com/ to see if there were any planes.

Next time you see a weird craft in the air go this this website: https://www.adsbexchange.com/

If so, might I recommend ADSB Exchange?

Here are 2 tracking sites www.flightradar24.com www.adsbexchange.com

About anything you can see in the sky from Fairfax would be in ADS-B Out required airspace. You can look at a live map at https://www.adsbexchange.com/ or https://flightaware.com/

FlightRadar24 and FlightAware have been known to censor police and military aircraft. You might want to try ADS-B Exchange. I haven’t verified if the local police aircraft show up there or not.

ADSB Exchange Link

ADS-B is a protocol used by aircrafts to broadcast their position, altitude, speed, and other information. Nowadays, the majority of aircrafts broadcast ADS-B messages constantly. Anyone with the right equipment can listen to these messages. You can buy a relatively cheap USB dongle with an antenna on Amazon and install drivers for it on Linux. In my case I used usbipd-win to mount the USB device inside Ubuntu running in WSL2. Then I installed the Linux drivers and dump1090, a program that makes use of these drivers and then outputs ADS-B messages in a format that is easy to parse. While you can use dump1090 to display a neat table full of information about aircrafts, I wanted to use its raw output capabilities to parse ADS-B messages myself. It starts a simple TCP server that outputs raw ADS-B messages wrapped in Mode-S Beast frames. I'm not sure what Beast means, but I found something that looks like its spec here.

git clone https://github.com/flightaware/dump1090.git

Minor bug fixes and improvements to piaware, dump1090-fa, dump978-fa.

FROM buildpack-deps:bullseye-curl RUN apt-get update && \ apt-get install -y --no-install-recommends \ build-essential \ libncurses5-dev \ librtlsdr0 \ librtlsdr-dev \ libusb-1.0-0-dev \ pkg-config \ python3-dev \ supervisor ENV READSB_VERSION v3.9.0 ENV READSB_URL https://github.com/Mictronics/readsb/archive/${READSB_VERSION}.tar.gz RUN \ mkdir -p /tmp/readsb && \ cd /tmp/readsb && \ curl -sSL -o readsb.tar.gz ${READSB_URL} && \ tar xvf readsb.tar.gz --strip-components=1 && \ make RTLSDR=yes && \ mv readsb viewadsb /usr/local/bin && \ cd / && \ rm -r /tmp/readsb ENV DUMP1090_VERSION v6.1 ENV DUMP1090_URL https://github.com/flightaware/dump1090/archive/refs/tags/${DUMP1090_VERSION}.tar.gz RUN \ mkdir -p /tmp/dump1090 && \ cd /tmp/dump1090 && \ curl -sSL -o dump1090.tar.gz ${DUMP1090_URL} && \ tar xvf dump1090.tar.gz --strip-components=1 && \ make RTLSDR=yes && \ mv dump1090 view1090 /usr/local/bin && \ cd / && \ rm -r /tmp/dump1090 ENV MLAT_CLIENT_VERSION v0.3.8 ENV MLAT_CLIENT_URL https://github.com/adsbxchange/mlat-client/archive/${MLAT_CLIENT_VERSION}.tar.gz RUN \ mkdir -p /tmp/mlat && \ cd /tmp/mlat && \ curl -sSL -o mlat.tar.gz ${MLAT_CLIENT_URL} && \ tar xvf mlat.tar.gz --strip-components=1 && \ ./setup.py install && \ cd / && \ rm -r /tmp/mlat COPY dump1090.sh mlat-client.sh readsb.sh supervisord.conf /srv/ CMD [ "supervisord", "-c", "/srv/supervisord.conf" ]

For rtl1090, is this one what you're looking at? I'm not super well-versed in SDR, so I'm not familiar with the state of the software stacks/standard forks/etc. That project built cleanly for me on GCC 11.2.1, though. It actually manually defines -fno-common in its Makefile though, so I'd guess I'm looking at a different version of the software.

dump1090 or readsb (wiedehopf also has a bunch of related utilities/guides on github)

https://github.com/flightaware/dump1090 (used by flightaware)