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If you’ve ever wondered about the planes flying above your head, you could always listen in to ADS-B transmissions to learn more about them. [thefatmoop] has built a rig to do just that, and it comes in under $50 in parts.
The build is based around the Meshnology W12 board, which combines an ESP32-S3 microcontroller with an LR2021 LoRa Radio. The latter is able to be tuned into transmissions in the realm of 1090 MHz and it can capture ADS-B traffic that uses OOK and Manchester encoding. The data is passed to the ESP32-S3 which validates the CRCs of the captured data and serves up the aircraft tracks on a simple web interface. A GNSS receiver can also be added in so the board knows its own location as well as the location of the planes that it’s tuning in.
[thefatmoop] reports decent performance with the rig, pulling in aircraft tracks from up to 150 nautical miles away using a 915 MHz antenna. There are some mods required to achieve this performance, though—namely, you’ll want to modify the filter configuration on the board to avoid it attenuating the 1090 MHz signals of interest.
There are lots of other ways to listen to ADS-B signals, too—you can always grab yourself an SDR and get going. If you’re cooking up your own cheap radio hacks, don’t hesitate to let us know on the tipsline!
Thanks to [Moser] for the tip!
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