Peter Vogel’s Tech Wise
A typical mid-afternoon air traffic scene across the Pacific Northwest as seen from Peter Vogel’s home tracking system.
About a year ago, well, about a month before the declaration of the COVID-19 pandemic, I began to track aircraft electronically. As it turned out, those were heady days for the airline industry: historic numbers of travellers, record employment, huge demand for pilots, and of course abundant interesting aircraft for a hobbyist to track.
Automated electronic aircraft tracking by enthusiasts has been possible for a number of years but what has made it particularly appealing more recently is the relatively low cost involved. In fact, for some, the cost is basically zero.
Many readers of this piece will be familiar with plane tracking apps that run on phones. Particularly prevalent are the two dominant flight tracking services, FlightAware, based in Houston, and FlightRadar24, based in Stockholm. With such apps all it takes is a click or two to “see” aircraft nearby, or in fact over pretty much any place on Earth.
What readers may not know is how that aircraft data gets to the app in the first place.
That’s where the aircraft enthusiast becomes part of the picture. Cheap and fast internet service, coupled with inexpensive computer power, along with some form of antenna, is all that is needed to set up an aircraft tracking station. Such a station “listens” on a frequency of 1090 MHz for so-called ADS-B (Automatic Dependent Surveillance–Broadcast) signals from aircraft. Broadcasting of ADS-B from aircraft is becoming a global standard and the data can be used for a variety of outcomes, ranging from safety (automated self-separation) to the delivery of more fuel efficient routes.
So big is the demand for commercial aircraft data that companies such as FlightAware and FlightRadar24 will provide turnkey tracking stations at no cost to enthusiasts in underserved areas.
In my case, there are already numerous tracking stations in the Metro Vancouver area, so I didn’t qualify for a no-cost station. I didn’t see that as an obstacle, as I’m naturally interested in and curious about any and all forms of radio signals. So I decided to set up my own station.
Initially, I experimented with a generic software-defined radio (see my previous column on SDR), and a simple antenna that I taped to the end of a long painter’s pole, at a height of about six metres. However, I quickly learned that a better route was to get a dedicated aircraft tracking SDR. I settled on the Prostick Plus from FlightAware. It looks like an oversized thumb drive and costs about $25.
After experimenting with odds and ends of flight tracking software running on a Windows 10 computer, I decided that a more reliable solution would be to dedicate a computer to the task. Not a typical desktop computer, mind you, but rather a small Raspberry Pi computer, about the size of a paperback book.
What drew me to the Raspberry Pi was the fact that FlightAware had a dedicated piece of flight tracking software, called PiAware, ready to go. Although I initially saw the Raspberry Pi route as a bit of a hurdle, it in fact wasn’t and it subsequently made me want to try other radio signal projects with that form of computer.
All I needed was the Raspberry Pi computer (these can be acquired in several forms, starting at around $50) and a microSD card. After learning how to place the PiAware file onto the card, and tweaking the Pi a little so it could see my home Wi-Fi network, I was set. I plugged the FlightAware Prostick Plus into a USB port on the Pi, and attached a line from my antenna to its input connection.
That’s it! As I write this column it is 435 days since the flight tracker was turned on. It hasn’t missed a day. In fact it has only missed an hour or two when there was a power outage in my area. I can see the planes my system is tracking directly on my laptop, along with all sorts of interesting data about each plane.
Right away I began posting to my various social media feeds about aircraft I found fascinating. About three weeks in, another local aircraft enthusiast saw some of my posts and quite unexpectedly he arrived at my door with an extremely sophisticated antenna. He explained it was time for him to step back from some of his projects and he wanted to give his tracking gear to another tracking hobbyist.
From that day his antenna has served as my data source for aircraft tracking signals. In the intervening months I’ve also begun feeding my data to FlightRadar24.
You might ask what is in this for the operators of these feeder stations, seeing as the host companies are repackaging and reselling aggregate data to airlines and airports. Both of the major tracking companies offer their enterprise-level accounts as perks, at no charge. Such accounts are normally priced in the $90-amonth range.
I review my FlightAware statistics, which are very extensive, every day at 5 p.m. (that corresponds to 0000 UTC) to check on the number of aircraft seen by my tracker, the number of positions counted, and to look at range distribution. My antenna is positioned in such a way that I have coverage into Oregon.
Each day I typically post one or two fascinating flights that I’ve spotted through the tracker (I’ve seen a Bangladesh Air Force helicopter that was in the Fraser Valley for servicing, a NASA airborne telescope over Vancouver Island, and no shortage of interesting executive jets during the pandemic), and once a week I post a collage of the most unusual planes detected by my antenna and tracker.
So, next time you happen to look at one of those aircraft tracking apps on your mobile you will know how the data got there. It came from hundreds, if not thousands, of small tracking setups like mine, across the globe.
Follow me on X (@PeterVogel) or on Bluesky (petervogel.bsky.social).