Build Your Own Raspberry Pi Flight Tracker

2023-03-16 | By Nate_Larson

License: See Original Project Raspberry Pi

Have you ever looked at a plane flying overhead and wondered where it was going? Where it came ‎from? Did you know you can easily find out and help track aircraft using a Raspberry Pi?‎

All you need to put together a Raspberry Pi flight tracker is a Raspberry Pi, power supply, microSD card, ‎and a Software Defined Radio (SDR) with Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) ‎support, such as the RTL2832-based SDR I received some time back in AdaBox007.‎

ADS-B information is transmitted by aircraft to provide identification and altitude information to other ‎aircraft as well as ground-based air traffic control stations. Using an SDR, we can receive this data, and ‎when paired with the data from other receivers using a service such as FlightRadar24, the position of ‎the aircraft can be triangulated.‎

Raspberry Pi Flight Tracker

Setup the Operating System

To create your own flight tracker, begin by flashing your microSD card with the latest version of ‎Raspberry Pi OS using the Raspberry Pi Imager.‎

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Before flashing the SD card, open the advanced options by clicking the gear icon.‎

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From the advanced options window, set your device’s hostname and password, enable SSH, configure ‎your wireless LAN, and select your locale settings. Then write the operating system to your SD card.‎

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Once the software is written to the microSD card, remove the card from the PC and install it on the Pi. ‎Plug the SDR USB dongle into one of the Pi’s USB ports and power up the Pi.‎

Setup and Configure Your Flight Tracker

With your Pi booted, we need to connect to the Pi via SSH to install the flight tracker software. Note ‎that this can also be done locally on the Pi by connecting a keyboard, mouse, and monitor directly to ‎the Pi and opening a terminal window if you so choose.‎

Using a program such as PuTTY or Tera Term, open an SSH connection to your Pi using the hostname ‎you previously assigned, followed by “.local”. In my case, I can connect to my Pi at FR24Pi.local.‎

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Once logged in, make sure your Pi’s software is up to date by entering the following commands:‎

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sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade
sudo reboot

Allow your Pi to reboot, then reopen the SSH connection. The next command will install the ‎FlightRadar24 flight tracker software. If you haven’t already signed up for a free FlightRadar24 account, ‎you should go to https://www.flightradar24.com/premium/signup to do so now.‎

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Install the flight tracker software:‎

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sudo bash -c "$(wget -O - https://repo-feed.flightradar24.com/install_fr24_rpi.sh)"‎

Step 1.1: When prompted, enter the email address used for your FlightRadar24 account.‎

Fight Tradar24

Step 1.2: Since this is our first time setting up a flight tracker, we can leave this step blank.‎

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Step 1.3: MLAT is the process by which aircraft positional data is triangulated as was mentioned earlier. ‎To participate in these MLAT calculations, answer yes to this step.‎

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Step 3.A: Enter your antenna’s latitude. You can find the latitude, longitude, and elevation for your ‎location using this website: https://www.freemaptools.com/elevation-finder.htm ‎

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Step 3.B: Enter your antenna’s longitude.‎

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Step 3.C: Enter your antenna’s altitude. Remember to enter the altitude in feet.‎

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You will then be asked to confirm these settings are correct.‎

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Step 4.1: Specify your receiver. For the RTL2832-based SDR USB dongle we are using, we can select ‎option 1.‎

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Step 4.3: Leave this step blank.‎

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Step 5.1 & Step 5.2: We don’t need these data feeds, so we can answer no to both.‎

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Step 6: Enter 0 to disable logging.‎

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With that, the setup is complete, and we are now feeding flight data to FlightRadar24. Note that this ‎process may take some time to finish, so be patient and keep this window open until the command ‎prompt displays indicating the process is complete.‎

View Data

Now that setup is complete, you can view the flights your receiver is picking up by pointing your ‎browser to your Pi’s hostname followed by “/dump1090/gmap.html”. In my case, this information is ‎found at http://fr24pi.local/dump1090/gmap.html

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Additionally, you can open the https://www.flightradar24.com/ homepage, select the filter option, ‎and input your radar ID from above to see only the aircraft your receiver is picking up.‎

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Getting Better Reception

You will note from the above filter that we are not currently able to track many aircraft in our region. ‎This is due to the antenna being in a suboptimal location. Remember that antenna position matters, so ‎for better reception, try placing your receiver near a window or outside. In optimal conditions, you ‎may be able to track aircraft 250 miles from your receiver’s location. Below, you can see reception ‎and range improved dramatically when I relocated the receiver to its permanent position on one of my ‎outbuildings.‎

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For the final placement, I mounted my Pi in a weatherproof enclosure with a clear lid so I can add a ‎camera as well, but that is for a different project. I drilled holes using a step drill bit and used cable ‎glands to seal the wires for the power supply and antenna to keep the enclosure weathertight so I ‎could mount my Pi outside where the antenna would have unobstructed access to aircraft ‎transmissions.‎

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You may also notice I added a Fan SHIM to keep my Pi cool, for which you can find the installation ‎guide here: https://www.digikey.com/en/maker/projects/getting-started-with-fan-‎shim/314fa57086944d00871adb95ccf4a804 ‎

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Going Further

FlightRadar24 is just one of many flight-tracking communities available. Should you decide, you would ‎like to feed your data to different or additional communities, the setup process is often similar and ‎requires no additional hardware. Here are a couple other flight tracker communities you may consider ‎contributing your data to:‎

https://www.adsbexchange.com/how-to-feed/#feedclient

https://flightaware.com/adsb/piaware/install