Chris Smolinski Of HFUnderground.com and Black Cat Systems wrote up a great How To on his RadioHobbyist blog about getting the R820T USB RTL-SDR DVB-T Dongle working for ADS-B, and listening for data bursts from nearby air traffic.

For those unfamilar, a few years ago there as a small boon of USB “TV Tuner” adapters that hit the market. If you live in a weak “Over the Air” market, they weren’t all that great.

However, the chipset in them, offered hobbyists a little more bang for the buck in the form of a low-cost SDR.

While Chris’ installation and experiment worked under Ubuntu, and later became part of his snazzy new Mac app, Cocoa1090, I wanted to attempt getting the R820T dongle up under Raspbian on my Raspberry Pi.

My Current Setup:

Raspberry Pi, Model B

NooElec R820T: http://www.nooelec.com/store/computer-peripherals/usb-ota-receivers/dvb-t-receivers.html – If you’re really brave, NooElec sells an upconverter that will expand its abilities and complements the http://sdr.osmocom.org/trac/wiki/GrOsmoSDR project.

Snazzy Case: Radio Shack “Sidekick” Arduino kit container, left over from previous project, FREE WITH PURCHASE! :D http://bit.corq.co/12PF8eA

Code: Dump1090, installed via git for the RPi, how-to here via satsignal.eu: http://bit.corq.co/12PEApe

Using:

./dump1090 --interactive --net --net-beast --net-ro-port 31001

I was quickly aggregating data from the dongle:

If you want a simple web-page based output (using the IP of your Raspberry Pi and a simple Gui:

From the Dump1090 directory; (example: /opt/dump1090)

./dump1090 --gain -100 --net --net-ro-port 31001 --net-http-port 8080

From the SatSignal.eu link, there are further instructions for scripting the process to run at the RPi’s startup; this gets you both a client/server port to connect to with a 3rd party app, or a simple web gui without much extra work.

If you’re a windows enthusiast, and really want that Client/server based GUI, give this post a look:

http://sdrsharp.com/index.php/a-simple-and-cheap-ads-b-receiver-using-rtl-sdr

It should connect from any windows PC to the port you defined with dump1090, and give you fascinating flight tracking info right from the RPi with and a minimal amount of install time.

Awesome further reading on the Dump1090 Project itself, can be found here:

http://rtl1090.web99.de/homepage/index.php

Thanks to Chris Smolinski for the inspiration and the links.