Welcome to PlaneSpotting’s documentation!

PlaneSpotting is a software package written in python3 which can decode ADS-B(Automatic Dependant Survelliance Broadcast) from the output provided by dump1090 (a C based Mode-S decoder which is designed for RTL-SDR devices).

The RTL-SDR devices record at 1090 MHz and outputs a binary (.dat) file. This file is processed by dump1090 which provides us with the raw ADS-B frames from that recording in ‘mlat’ AVR format(ascii hexdump of the frames with the sample position). The processed files serves as the input for this project.

All ADS-B frames do not contain position information in them. To be specific only frames with Downlink Format(DF) 17-18 and Type Code(TC) 9-18 carry the location as the payload. Thus, the next part of this project is to find the location of the plane at the point when a non-position carrying frame is sent using multilateration.

Multilateration is a method by which the location of an aircraft (can be any moving object which broadcasts a signal) using multiple ground stations and the Time Difference of Arrival(TDOA) of a signal to each ground station.

Contents:

• Getting Started
  • Requirements
  • Installation
• PlaneSpotting: Technical Documentation
  • Utility functions
  • File loading and transfer
  • Frame Identification and Decoding
  • Data Extraction from ADS-B frames
  • Airborne Parameters Calculation
  • File Overlap check and search of unique signals
• Tutorials & Usage

Indices and tables

• Index
• Module Index
• Search Page

Copyright and License

Copyright (c) 2019 Shoumik Dey, Andreas Hornig, AerospaceResearch

This project is distributed under the open source MIT License. Please find ‘LICENSE’ in the main directory of the project.