Overview
A software-defined radio receiver station built around an RTL-SDR dongle (driver-flashed with Zadig), running open-source tooling to track two things overhead: aircraft and weather balloons.
ADS-B aircraft tracking
Decoding 1090 MHz ADS-B transponder broadcasts with dump1090 and viewing live traffic — position, altitude, speed, and callsign — on the tar1090 web map, fed straight from the SDR.
Radiosonde tracking
Receiving weather-balloon radiosondes in the ~400 MHz band (RS41 sondes around
403 MHz) by piping rtl_fm into the open-source RS decoders (rs1729), then
plotting and uploading each sonde’s GPS position and ascent/descent profile via
SondeHub, with optional APRS output.
Toolbox
RTL-SDR hardware with SDR# and SDR++ for general spectrum work and rtl_433 for decoding 433 MHz ISM sensors.