Track Aircraft With ADSBee, an Open Source ADS-B Receiver

What is ADS-B? It’s what the airplanes speak!

This article appeared in Make: Vol. 95. Subscribe to Make: for more great articles.

Automatic Dependent Surveillance — Broadcast (ADS-B) is a protocol used by aircraft for transmitting their location and other information to other aircraft and to air traffic control. ADS-B is transmitted on 1090MHz via a pulse position modulation protocol called Mode S, and has become an internationally adopted standard over the decades since it was originally introduced.

Because the protocol is unencrypted, aviation buffs have created numerous hardware and software solutions for decoding, saving, and sharing ADS-B data from around the world. Aggregators for this data include community websites like airplanes.live and businesses like FlightAware and FlightRa