Welcome! We are just getting things started. Our first order of business will be to collecting plane positions using ADS-B and a Software Defined Radio.
Background
RTL-SDRs are a class of popular, low-cost SDR that are based on a repurposed digital TV chip. They can only cover about 2.4MHz of spectrum at a time, but that is more than enough for our purposes. Dump1090 is a popular program that uses an RTL-SDR to capture and decode ADS-B messages. These decoded messages are made available over a network port and there is both a text and web user interface for monitoring planes.
First Task
Our first task is going to be placing dump1090 in a docker container and then creating a small program that can convert the network messages from dump1090 into MQTT messages. We will report back here on our progress!