ADS-B Monitoring

Recording and processing ADS-B data using a Radarcape

Software

Utilities are written for a companion computer connected to the same network as the Radarcape, mostly in Python with a bit of BASH.

ADS-B Recording

The raw recording is just done in bash:

nc -C radarcape.local 30003 | grep -a MSG,[13] | split -l1000 -a4 -d --additional-suffix=.csv

This reads the port 30003 output, grabs only messages 1 and 3, and saves the results to files in chunks of 1000 lines. The script log_raw.sh combines this with some nicety about making a folder with a timestamp.

Processing

Script data_to_results.py converts the raw data to a more usable format, still CSV, but with each row as:

ID,date,time,altitude,latitude,longitude,callsign

This gives a row for each message of type 3 and looks up the callsign from the last message of type 1 with the same ID.

Prettifying

make_kml.py searches the current folder and all subfolders, recursively, and combines any data_***.csv files it finds into one big KML file.

Hardware

For standalone operation, the Radarcape receiver is mounted in a waterproof enclosure with a Hubi 2k solar power system. A D-Link DWR-920 provides networking, including internet connectivity via 4G SIM and client connections via either WiFi or an external ethernet port.