3. ADS‐B

Hardware preparation

You need to change the id / serial number of the SDR stick you want to use for ADS-B, to distinguish it reliably from other rtl-sdr sticks. You do not want to mix it up after a reboot, it will result in not working ADS-B.

Plug your ADS-B stick in a PC with no other RTL-SDR stick connected. This can be your Raspberry Pi or every other linux computer with the rtl-sdr library installed.

Set the new serial with

sudo rtl_eeprom -s 10000001

Now you can access your stick with the serial number 10000001. Beware that smaller numbers like 2 do not work.

• Reboot the station and connect via ssh again

Install dump1090-fa

sudo apt-get install dump1090-fa

Configure dump1090

sudo nano /etc/default/dump1090-fa

• Set the RTL-SDR serial to the value set above

RECEIVER_SERIAL=10000001

• Set your receiver location
• To determine the position do not use your mobile phones GPS functionality since it can be quite unreliable, instead use a service like openstreetmap.org where you can right click on the map to show the address and coordinates.

LAT="51.xxxx"
LON="7.yyyyy"

• Turn on adaptive gain settings (recommended)

ADAPTIVE_DYNAMIC_RANGE=yes

Start dump1090

sudo service dump1090-fa start

Start feeding

You may now start feeding by installing our feeding package, ### shown here. Or you may install another service first, e.g. AIS and/or radiosonde.

Troubleshooting

• Check the number of planes you receive

cat /run/dump1090-fa/aircraft.json|grep -c hex

• It is very likely that it won't work, in this case you need to check the log

sudo journalctl -xeu dump1090-fa

• If you run into the following error message

Please fix the device permissions, e.g. by installing the udev rules file rtl-sdr.rules

• You need to create a udev rule file for your particular rtl-sdr sticks as shown here