readsb-protobuf VS dump1090

Mictronic's aircraft database appears to be available on github as json. It looks like they may also have the type descriptions from the ICAO doc available in json at the same link. I haven't looked that closely at the data. Previously I wrote some code to scrape it from the ICAO site.

this sub recently turned me on to readsb-protobuf, which is a more modern decoder that fills the same role as dump1090. there's a really nice Docker container that packages it up, and includes an output to InfluxDB, a time-series database. so you could potentially build this as a set of queries against an Influx instance, rather than maintaining your own state in a JSON file.

If you're interested in seeing your own data then you could just run something like readsb (https://github.com/Mictronics/readsb-protobuf) and tar1090 (https://github.com/wiedehopf/tar1090)

Depending on what you're running, you can push to plane.watch via a combination of readsb and mlat-client or we can pull from you - jump into the Discord and we'll see what works?

I find the dependencies for readsb-protobuf really difficult to install manually according to the instructions at https://github.com/Mictronics/readsb-protobuf.

There's really no need to pay FA to use an api for data that is publicly available. https://github.com/Mictronics/readsb-protobuf/tree/dev/webapp/src/db

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)