I haven't heard from him, so I have to assume Greg is still feeling a bit under the weather this month. Feel free to email him some get well soon messages: greg.gregwa@gmail.com
I recently stumbled upon a YouTube video showing how easy it was to track planes in real-time using a simple DVB USB stick. I decided to purchase one to see if it really was that easy. And it is!
These devices are about £20/$20 on eBay/Amazon. The one I have has the Realtek RTL8723BE chipset. Originally they were made to watch TV on your laptop, but several people realised that they actually covered a huge spectrum of radio frequencies and could be used for everything from listening to HAM radio, to tracking planes, and (with the right antennas) downloading weather data from NOAA satellites. They’re also known as RTL-SDR devices – RTL being a reference to the Realtek chipset and SDR being Software Defined Radio.
Prerequisites
The first thing you need to do is add the GQRX PAA to your sources. This is either done in your package manager, or in a terminal using:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gqrx/snapshots
Next, we want to add a PPA from Roman Moravcik who has the application we really want.
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:roman-moravcik/gnuradio
The problem now is that neither of these repositories have utopic releases, so, if you have trusty or lower, then you should be fine. If you have utopic then you’ll need to edit your software sources to change the end of those lines from:
utopic main
to:
trusty main
Now, we need to update the package list:
sudo apt-get update
And, finally, install:
sudo apt-get install gqrx
sudo apt-get install dump1090
This may take some time as there’s a lot of dependencies for GQRX (~125MB) – GNURadio being one of them. Fear not. Once you’ve gotten bored of tracking planes, you can use GQRX to scan the myriad of radio frequencies for other cool stuff.
GQRX isn’t actually what we want, but we do need the dependencies that it pulls in. The dump1090 application is what we really want.
Plug in your dongle, open a terminal, and type:
dump1090 –interactive
It may take a minute or two to scan and find planes, but soon you’ll be presented with a terminal screen with plane ID numbers, squawk codes, and, if being broadcast, the altitude, speed and GPS co-ordinates. Neat huh?
What’s that? You’d like to see it all on a map? Wow, you’re a tough cookie to please. But, since dump1090 has a server built in, you’re in luck, my friend!
Press CTRL + C twice to close dump1090, if it’s running.
In a terminal type:
dump1090 –interactive –net –net-beast –net-ro-port 31001
And here’s the magic: open a browser and go to:
Well, would you look at that!
Obviously, the only planes on the map are the ones who are broadcasting their GPS coordinates. It’s amazing to think that they’re broadcasting so much information completely open. But they are.
I’ve only scratched the surface of RTL-SDR devices in this article. Try loading up GQRX and scanning through the frequencies. It’s pretty incredible the amount of weird stuff you’ll find. Most of it won’t make sense, initially, but, with a bit of digging, you find out that some are ordinary FM radio stations and some are even frequencies broadcast by garage door openers, car alarms, etc.