There are many flight tracking services around the web and most of them are based on ADS-B receivers placed by individuals. Few months ago I put together simple GP antenna, RTL-SDR and installed Pi-Aware software. It fed data to FlightAware. Soon after one of my mod-school friends asked if I could do the same for FLightRadar24. After some search I found this github repo: Balena ADS-B Multi-Service Flight Tracker. I had good experience with balena (for LoRa gateways) and followed the really excellent step-by-step instructons. Below are some details about my installation of this Multi-Service Flight Tracker.
The plane tracker is now feeding online (with short outages) since August 2019.
I will descvribe here the USB interface between the redio station and the computer which I recently developed and tested. This post is a continuation of the first part, where I described a simple interface for controlling two digital lines using the USB / Serial Converter, where I presented simple interface to control two digital signals (e.g. PTT and CW). This time I will describe an interface that combines more functions:
Controlling several digital (switching) inputs and outputs,
Interface for controlling the station via the serial interface
Audio input and output interface (sound card)
I had some implementation issues with the microcontrollers and USB virtual com ports, which I have described in detail in the previous contribution, I decided it’s better using the tested solutions. The block diagram of the interface is swhown in following picture:
In this post, I will first introduce some of the basic technical background of the control of the transmit signal (PTT) and other signals (eg CW or linear activation).The second part will describe the interface development and the final product.
