We've been building open source embedded ADS-B receivers for a while, and spent the past 8 months smallifying our existing receiver tech with a new chip from Semtech. Ask me anything about ADSB or hardware manufacturing!
Our tenants live in our property that is in a known Airport Influence Area ("AIA")[1] but this year, they reported to us the noise associated with the airport's Instrument Approach Procedures have increased. Airplanes arriving at the airport fly less than 1,000 feet in elevation right above our neighborhood. Even worse, airplanes come in consecutively so the noise is back to back w/o much reprieve.
The Noise and Capacity Office allows to manually report[2] such aircraft but I'm wondering if this device can detect these aircrafts which can lead to report submission. Any insight on doing this is appreciated!
The data broadcast from ADS-B includes both GPS position (Lat + Lon) and altitude. If you created a bounding box, you could add a height parameter to make it 3D, and get a list of such aircraft and the timestamps of their transmissions while inside that (3D) bounding box.
That wouldn't be too difficult to do with a little bit of filtering of the feed coming out of an ADS-B receiver.
Wow that's incredibly cool! I've been doing ADS-B with a tracker in my window using a pair of RTL-SDRs for more than a decade at this point. This seems like it could make a nice improvement to the Stratux project (ADS-B in / poor man's TCAS for small planes) as well.
We make a few devices already that work as a drop-in stratux replacement! An ultra low cost version based on m1421 is definitely on our minds but we're focusing on keeping up with our preorders for Winglet first. Most of the work on sensor integration should be able to be ported to an m1421 based receiver in the future if we decide to go that route.
I was about to say, “coolnamesalltaken already has a pretty small one,” but you are them! I’m definitely excited by this project, I have something I wanted to add ADS-B integration to and this looks like an even better option!
As for a question, how do you balance low power with performance? Is there a target range or use case to decide the performance envelope?
Ha, it's very fun to see that people know about the project!
ADSBee 1421's very low power consumption is determined by its architecture. Where ADSBee 1090 has a discrete RF frontend with multiple power hungry LNAs and a power detector chip, plus a dual core RP2040, an ESP32 S3 module, and a CC1312, ADSBee 1421 just has an LR2021 chip and a CC1314. A single LNA on the ADSBee 1090's RF frontend actually draws about as much power as the whole m1421!
The tradeoff is that we have fewer CPU cycles available for crunching packets compared to the ADSBee 1090, and the LR2021 has some quirks that result in it only being able to receive ADS-B packets in its maximum dynamic range configuration (so we support Mode S DF17 only, no squitter packets or altitude / surveillance replies like you get with DF4/5/11). That said, this has been plenty for customers who are looking for an aircraft detect and avoid solution plus UAT traffic / weather.
Based on our testing so far, ADSBee m1421 is well suited to general aviation applications (portable flight bag / cockpit avionics), drone flight controllers (aircraft detect and avoid), and anything that needs to be low cost or easy to run off a solar panel or little battery.
For customers looking to build something like an airport ground station, where they want all squitter and extended squitter packet formats and a higher max packet rate, we still recommend the ADSBee 1090 three-MCU architecture.
Components are specced on the datasheet according to regulatory requirements (e.g. where the ISM band is). What they can actually receive comes down to the performance of the RF frontend and the firmware :)
Yes, that's also us! The post you shared was from our ADSBee 1090 series of receivers, which are based on RP2040 PIO and a discrete RF frontend. Our new receiver is much smaller and optimized specifically for low power and embedded detect and avoid applications.
We're focusing on embedded applications with ADSBee m1421 applications right now but it's definitely tempting to roll m1421 into a smaller flight bag device. It's something we might get back around to once we have Winglet off the ground.
On the SDR side, dump978 is what most people use, but SDRs are generally not well suited to embedded applications in terms of power / form factor / cost.
Our firmware is fully open source, and our UAT decoder was introduced last year and has been working well (I think we've shaken all the bugs out at this point). We implemented everything from scratch so that it would run efficiently on our embedded RF MCU (TI CC1314). We support both UAT ADSB and UAT uplink (weather / traffic data).
The Noise and Capacity Office allows to manually report[2] such aircraft but I'm wondering if this device can detect these aircrafts which can lead to report submission. Any insight on doing this is appreciated!
[1] https://lacounty.maps.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=7cb3fb165...
[2] https://viewpoint.emsbk.com/lgb7