It should come as no surprise to regular readers of this blog that I frequently have planes on the brain…
Recently, this obsession interest led me towards building a small ADS-B ground station in my house! It’s got a dinky little antenna, so it can’t really pick up planes too far away, but it works great within the reaches of LA County and provides a pretty incredible live view of all of the traffic overhead.
The setup is almost dead simple if you choose to deploy the FlightAware PiAware solution - one just needs to snap together a Raspberry Pi, connect a 1090 MHz antenna to a receiver dongle/antenna filter, and flash a Micro SD card with their software.
I put my kit together a little over two weeks ago, and since then, my station has observed about two thousand flights a day!
PiAware Station Kit
Here’s what the setup looks like - I’ve got everything hooked up along the wall, and the antenna seated atop the curtain rod for my drapes. Originally, I had simply stuck the antenna along the back side of my air conditioning unit - safe to say that the detection range was not great from that orientation.
The move to higher elevations has been a big success as now I can frequently pull in planes 50+ miles away, letting me cover pretty much all of LA County from my perch in SM!
PiAware UI
The UI that FlightAware provides to monitor the data the Pi is receiving is pretty cool - you can keep tabs on the volume of aircraft reported, get a sense of the “range” of your receiver, and see what times of day are hotspots. In my case, the bulk of the traffic that I’m spotting is to the Southeast (there’s a busy airport there or something), the maximum range is somewhere between 50 and 100 miles, and there is a clear “quiet time” each night from 2 am to 6 am.
However, the coup de grace is definitely the live map - it’s so cool to have this open in a tab on my computer, and know that my little station is the one powering things!
Above was a relatively “quiet time” at LAX, so there were only 27 aircraft in view. Below is a snapshot of a higher-traffic period, with 66 aircraft in view!
