Zkitszo - The Real
October 01, 2026

Plane and Simple- Every ADS-B Tool in One List

Eight letters and a dot... adsb.cool. That's the whole web address. Type it in and you land on a list that somebody has been keeping tidy since early 2023- every ADS-B tool, map, feeder script, dataset and antenna maker worth knowing about, on one page.

I'm saving this here mostly for me to remember. The last time I went down the flight tracking rabbit hole it was a DEF CON badge and a spider-looking antenna that pulled me in. This time it's a GitHub "awesome list"- those curated link pages that the open source crowd keeps for just about every subject under the sun.

This one is rickstaa/awesome-adsb. It's released CC0 (public domain, do what you like with it), sits at 387 stars as I write this. Last update was September 5th, 2026. Not abandoned... not that... mostly.

So What's ADS-B Again?

ADS-B stands for Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast. Big words. What it means: the plane works out where it is from GPS, then shouts it out over the radio, over and over, about twice a second- position, altitude, speed, callsign. Anyone with a cheap radio and an antenna can listen in. No password, no encryption... it's "broadcast" for a reason.

Two frequencies to know. 1090 MHz is the worldwide one, the "1090ES" (extended squitter- a squitter being the little unprompted burst a transponder sends out on its own). 978 MHz, called UAT, is a US-only thing and only allowed below 18,000 feet, so it's mostly small general aviation planes on it. Since January 1st, 2020 the FAA has required ADS-B Out in most controlled US airspace, which is a big part of why the skies got so much easier to watch.

How far can a home setup hear? It's line of sight, so the curve of the earth decides. Typical is somewhere around 200 to 250 km. A well-placed antenna up high can push towards 400 km or a bit more. Planes at cruise altitude are easier to hear far away than the ones on approach down low.

From the Plane Overhead to the Map on Your Screen Aircraft transponder squitters 1090 MHz (world) 978 MHz UAT (US) Antenna + Filter high, clear sky view 1090 band-pass / LNA (some sticks built in) SDR Dongle RTL-SDR / FlightAware or AirNav stick one decoder per stick Single-Board Computer Raspberry/ Orange/ Banana Pi readsb decodes · adsb.im image or Docker ultrafeeder Your Own Map tar1090 in the browser graphs1090, Grafana planefence, plane-alert Open Aggregators adsb.lol · adsb.fi airplanes.live · ADSBHub unfiltered, free APIs Commercial Trackers FlightAware · Flightradar24 AirNav Radar · Plane Finder honour FAA LADD blocking

That's the whole hobby on one page, more or less. The list is laid out the same way- docs, aggregators, software, data, hardware. I'll go through it in roughly that order, with the bits I had to go dig up elsewhere filled in.

The Aggregators- Who Gets the Data

An "aggregator" is a site that collects what thousands of home receivers hear and stitches it into one world map. The list sorts them into open source, community, non-profit and commercial, ranked by how many feeders (home stations sending data in) each one had on January 17th, 2026.

Why are there so many open ones? Short history lesson... For years ADS-B Exchange was the unfiltered tracker, the one that didn't hide anybody. On January 25th, 2023 it was bought by JETNET, an aviation data company. A good chunk of the community didn't love that. Within a couple of weeks adsb.fi, ADSB.lol, ADSB One and TheAirTraffic had popped up. Later that year airplanes.live came along, started by some of the people who used to work on ADS-B Exchange. One sale, five new maps.

The open source four at the top of the list:

  • ADSB.lol- fully open source, data under the ODbL licence, a free API and free history files going back to 2023.
  • adsb.fi- community run, unfiltered, with a free API for personal and non-commercial use (one request a second).
  • airplanes.live- unfiltered map... the list says free API too. More on that further down. Hmm.
  • ADSB One- still up and running as I write this.

Then the commercial crowd- FlightAware, Flightradar24, Plane Finder, AirNav Radar. These carry a footnote in the list: they follow the FAA's LADD program (Limiting Aircraft Data Displayed), where an owner can ask for their tail number to be kept off public maps. So the big sites are filtered. The open ones aren't.

Worth knowing the catch though- LADD only binds companies that take the FAA's own data feed. A network of home receivers hearing the plane straight off the air isn't bound by it at all. That's why owners who really want privacy use PIA instead (Privacy ICAO Address), a temporary transponder address that doesn't point back to the registry. Same plane, different "name" on the radio.

Two oddballs round it out. Airframes.io does ACARS and the other text messages planes send (it's the one from that badge post). OpenSky Network is the research one- a Swiss non-profit that grew out of a 2012 university project and hands its full dataset to researchers.

Software, the Bits that Do the Work

This is where I'd tell anyone new to start... and where the list is at its best.

The heart of it is a decoder- the program that turns the raw radio noise from the dongle into "this plane, here, at this height". The list names readsb as the "ADS-B decoder swiss knife"... it pretty much is. Pair it with tar1090 for the map in your browser, with trails behind every plane.

Three ways to get there, easiest first.

The no-terminal way

adsb.im is a ready-made SD card image. Flash it, boot the Pi, open a web page, type in your location, flip switches for which aggregators you want to share with. That's it. No command line at all... for those new to this world, this is the one.

The script way

For a Pi already running Raspberry Pi OS, the readsb install from wiedehopf's wiki is one line plus a reboot:

sudo bash -c "$(wget -O - https://github.com/wiedehopf/adsb-scripts/raw/master/readsb-install.sh)"
sudo reboot

Then tell it where the antenna is and set a starting gain (the wiki's example numbers below- swap in your own coordinates):

sudo readsb-set-location 50.12344 10.23429
sudo readsb-gain 43.9

The map shows up at http://<your-pi-ip>/tar1090.

Heads up, the script removes any other decoder it finds (dump1090-fa and friends). Only one program can talk to the dongle at a time, so it clears the way. If you've got the RTL-SDR Blog V4 stick, there's a gotcha in the wiki in bold- the stock Raspberry Pi OS drivers don't work with the V4. You get the stick showing up and then... nothing. No planes. Install the driver from rtl-sdr.com/V4 first.

The Docker way

ultrafeeder bundles readsb, tar1090, graphs1090, autogain and a multi-feeder into one container. If the Pi is already running other containers this keeps things tidy. The SDR-Enthusiasts guide walks the whole thing step by step, hardware included. Honestly it's the best single read on the whole list.

Feeding- sharing what you hear

Once planes show up on your own map, sharing them is a script each. They sit alongside each other without stepping on each other's toes:

# adsb.lol
curl -fsL -o /tmp/adsblol.sh https://adsb.lol/feed.sh && sudo bash /tmp/adsblol.sh

# adsb.fi
curl -L -o /tmp/feed.sh https://adsb.fi/feed.sh
sudo bash /tmp/feed.sh

# airplanes.live
curl -L -o /tmp/feed.sh https://raw.githubusercontent.com/airplanes-live/feed/main/install.sh
sudo bash /tmp/feed.sh

Did it work? adsb.fi's own readme gives the check- look for connections on ports 30004 (the data) and 31090 (MLAT):

netstat -t -n | grep -E '30004|31090'

MLAT, quick explainer... multilateration. Older planes that don't broadcast their position can still be placed on the map by timing when their signal hits four or more receivers. That's why every feeder script asks for your exact location and height.

The rest of the software section is the fun stuff. plane-alert-db is a list of "interesting" aircraft- governments, military, historical, and in the list's own words, "just plain odd". planefence logs whatever flies through a fence you draw around your house. plane-notify pings you when a chosen plane takes off or lands... yes, that's the kind of tool behind those famous celebrity private jet accounts.

The Data, and Pulling It Yourself

Don't want to build anything? You can still play. adsb.lol's API needs no key- here's every plane within 50 nautical miles of a point (London, in this case):

curl -s https://api.adsb.lol/v2/point/51.5/-0.1/50

Both adsb.lol and adsb.fi's open endpoints were answering with real aircraft on October 1st, 2026. For history, adsb.lol keeps a year of daily traces per GitHub repo- globe_history_2023 through globe_history_2026. Somebody has already turned that into flight schedule datasets, which is in the list too. There's a bit of this in the Hormuz post too...

If you want to actually understand the signal, the list's one book is Junzi Sun's "The 1090 Megahertz Riddle"- free, written by the same person behind the pyModeS Python decoder.

Before the Drone Goes Up

Here's where all this gets personal for me. My station is an RTL-SDR dongle, version 3, and I feed adsb.lol- an amazing free source of air traffic. I also use these services, especially adsb.lol and ADS-B Exchange, to do an initial flight pre-check to make sure I'm good to go with no conflicts before I launch my DJI Matrice 4T for a fly.

Even though I'm in an OK zone to fly, and I have my drone licence, there are still situations I need to monitor and be wary of... take care and consideration of. There are, and have been, many low flying aircraft passing by at altitudes which would conflict with flying a drone- and would be dangerous had I had my drone deployed. This helps identify possible conflicts and mitigate any dangerous situations.

I believe all drone pilots should do such a check.. not just depend on the data provided through their drone platform, like the FlightAware app on DJI's controller (that's the name on the controller's home screen where you pick your apps). Though it is good with flight geofencing, providing maps of OK and no fly zones, restricted areas... I've discovered that certain flights had not shown up within that FlightAware app or others, where I'd be able to see them on ADS-B Exchange or adsb.lol. Remember the LADD filtering from earlier? That's one reason the big apps can miss a plane the open maps still show.

Though even those resources sometimes don't show every flight. ADS-B Out is only required in certain airspace- the FAA's 2020 rule covers the controlled stuff, and in Canada it's Class A and B only so far, with the lower classes still to come. A helicopter or small plane down low may not be broadcasting at all. The Matrice 4T does carry DJI's AirSense, an ADS-B receiver that alerts on aircraft within about 10 km... it can only warn about planes that transmit, same as every map on this list.

So pilot awareness at all times is a necessity. Flying a drone is a privilege! One must respect the activity in high regard, since not doing so can lead to loss of property... loss of life even.

Hardware Mentions

The list keeps this short, so let's fill it in some.

  • Computer. Raspberry Pi, Orange Pi or Banana Pi. Any of them that runs Linux will do.
  • Receiver. A USB SDR dongle. The purpose-built ones from FlightAware and AirNav have a low-noise amplifier tuned for 1090 MHz built in. FlightAware's Pro Stick Plus adds a filter too, around $46 US. Mine is a general purpose RTL-SDR, version 3. The newer RTL-SDR Blog V4 runs about $30 to $40 and does everything else in the radio world as well... there's a whole post on those already.
  • Filter. Only if you're near cell towers or other strong signals. The list warns that some sticks already have one- don't double up.
  • Antenna. Vinnant (Slovakia) and DPD (USA) are the premium names on the list. The DIY "Son of Boris" from Airframes is the cheap and cheerful one people rave about.

Height beats gain, every time. A basic antenna on the roof will out-hear a fancy one on a windowsill.

Where the List Has Gone Stale

Okay... the not so shiny part. Every one of the 76 links got clicked for this post (well, a script clicked them). Most are fine. Six came back "403 forbidden"... bot walls, not dead sites. Then there's the stuff that has gone out of date:

  • airplanes.live "free API". Not any more. Ask it for planes today and it answers with a "please contact us" message asking you to email them a description of your project. Their API repo was archived on April 29th, 2026. From what I could find, too many people (and AI coding tools) were hammering it. The list still says free. It isn't.
  • RadarBox is now AirNav Radar- renamed back in December 2024. The store link just redirects.
  • adsb-meta-tracker, the Android app in the list, has been archived since 2023.
  • dump1090 points at the original MalcolmRobb version, which hasn't been touched since 2024. FlightAware's dump1090-fa and readsb are the maintained ones. flightmon hasn't moved since 2020.
  • The adsb.lol history link now lands on the 2026 repo only. Earlier years each have their own.
  • The book link goes to the first edition. A second edition (free, TU Delft) lives at mode-s.org/1090mhz.
  • raspberrypi.org is the education foundation. The boards are sold from raspberrypi.com.
  • And the subtitle of the whole thing says "ASD-B". The GitHub description too. One typo in the most important word on the page...

None of that makes it a bad list. It's a good list! Contributions are open- the "Follow" section has sat empty with a TODO asking for names, so there's an easy first pull request sitting right there for somebody.

Anybody out there feeding already? Which aggregator did you go with- open, commercial, both? And how far out does your setup reach? Drone pilots- do you run a check like this before you launch, or trust the app? Leave a comment, would love to see some range numbers.

Oh, and if you're in the US... a second dongle on 978 MHz picks up the small planes the 1090 crowd misses. Something to think about for round two.

https://adsb.cool
https://github.com/rickstaa/awesome-adsb

Glossary

  • ADS-B — Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast. Aircraft work out their own position by GPS and broadcast it for anyone to receive.
  • 1090ES — "1090 MHz Extended Squitter", the worldwide ADS-B radio link.
  • Squitter — a short message a transponder sends on its own, without being asked by radar.
  • UAT — Universal Access Transceiver, the 978 MHz ADS-B link used only in the US below 18,000 feet.
  • Mode S — the transponder system ADS-B messages ride on; every aircraft has a unique 24-bit Mode S (ICAO) address.
  • SDR — software defined radio. A cheap radio receiver whose tuning and decoding is done in software.
  • RTL-SDR — the family of USB TV-tuner sticks (RTL2832U chip) that became the hobby's go-to cheap SDR.
  • LNA — low-noise amplifier, boosts weak signals before they get to the receiver.
  • SAW filter — a small band-pass filter that lets 1090 MHz through and blocks strong signals nearby, like cell towers.
  • Decoder — the program (readsb, dump1090) that turns raw radio samples into aircraft messages.
  • Aggregator — a website that combines data from many home receivers into one map.
  • Feeder — a home station that sends what it hears to an aggregator.
  • MLAT — multilateration. Locating an aircraft by comparing when its signal arrives at four or more receivers.
  • LADD — the FAA's Limiting Aircraft Data Displayed program, which lets owners ask for their aircraft to be hidden on sites using FAA data.
  • PIA — Privacy ICAO Address, a temporary transponder address not linked to the aircraft's registration.
  • ACARS — Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System, short text messages between aircraft and the ground.
  • ODbL — Open Database Licence. Free to use and share as long as you credit the source and keep derived databases open.
  • CC0 — a Creative Commons dedication that puts a work in the public domain.
  • Awesome list — a curated GitHub link list on one subject, following the "awesome" format and lint rules.
  • AirSense — DJI's built-in ADS-B receiver on some drones; it warns the pilot about nearby aircraft that are broadcasting.
  • Geofencing — software limits that stop or warn a drone near restricted or no fly zones.
  • API — a web address a program can ask for data, getting back machine-readable JSON instead of a web page.

Sources

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