Scanning the Airwaves

 Yes, I know. It's been a while since I posted, just under a year. Unfortunately, as we all know, 2020 is not a normal year.  Aside from attending the amateur radio training session for the 2020 Boston Marathon, the Marathon was delayed until September and ultimately cancelled and replaced with a virtual event. The same goes for the 2020 Head of the Charles Regatta.  I was planning on going to my first Hamvention , but that too was cancelled. As was the May and October editions of NEAR-Fest . My last hope for some ham action was the Northeast HamXposition , but alas, it was also cancelled. As have all the monthly MIT Fleas for the year. It's not all bad though, we've still had NSRA meetings via Zoom and continued them into summer, which usually is a break period for the club. Also, there have been virtual ham expos and fests online, such as the QSO Today Ham Expo and the HamXposition is going virtual too. I just recently got back from a 3 month work deployment on Na...

I'm an avgeek, so I recently setup my own  Automatic dependent surveillance – broadcast or ASD-B receiver. There are plenty around. The most common setup is to use a Raspberry Pi with a PiAware image on an SD card, an RTL-SDR and a 1090 MHz antenna. There are also more dedicated setups using hardware provided by the major ADS-B tracking websites such as FlightAware and Flightradar24 . I went the Pi route. However, instead of using the FlightAware PiAware image that's commonly available; I choose to run the ADS-B Receiver image by  Joe Prochazka . My setup consists of a Raspberry Pi 3B, a FlightAware Pro Stick Plus and a cheap $7 1090 MHz antenna. The Pro Stick Plus is nice because it's essentially a RTL-SDR USB dongle with a built in 1090MHz filter and RF amp. FlightAware also offers the regular Pro Stick which does not include a 1090 MHz filter. I used the dump1090-flightaware version of the image, although it is available with another dump1090 version called d...