I've also been a ham radio enjoyer and had been looking for projects that work with radio. So I built a little antenna that works with ~1Mhz and hooked it to a raspberryPi running dump1090... it's amazing how far I can receive. 50-ish miles across a bunch of 12k-14k mountains.
However, I've switched to just using one of the ADSB sites because they have a lot more tracking info.
It's been super interesting to watch the tankers take off. Mostly c130 and md80, but there have been a pair of canadair float planes... quite a menagerie of aircraft.
Anyhow, the adsb stuff gets really interesting once you identify the spotting planes, as it's a little faster at identifying where agencies are looking at fires than WatchDuty (which also works very well).
> Radar is a system that uses radio waves to determine the distance (ranging), direction (azimuth and elevation angles), and radial velocity of objects relative to the site. It is a radiodetermination method used to detect and track aircraft [...]
> A radar system consists of a transmitter producing electromagnetic waves in the radio or microwave domain, a transmitting antenna, a receiving antenna (often the same antenna is used for transmitting and receiving) and a receiver and processor to determine properties of the objects. Radio waves (pulsed or continuous) from the transmitter reflect off the objects and return to the receiver, giving information about the objects' locations and speeds.
The OP's project only passively receives the digital location information of each airplane transmitted by the airplane itself. The project does not transmit radio waves nor do any physical determination of the plane's location.
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary_radar (true radar), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary_radar (ADS-B, which is what the OP receives)
I made it multi-purpose by showing air traffic when a flight enters the selected airspace and when there's no new traffic, it defaults to showing my Claude usage and reset duration. It works with ESPHome and also has Home Assistant Voice Assistant as I wanted to experiment with fully local HA Assist.
making esp32-based radar emitter would've been cool, tho
https://github.com/witnessmenow/ESP32-Cheap-Yellow-Display
Can also easily integrate with home assistant.
(But is is a cool project)
I've seen a few projects that use SDR to detect doppler shifts of reflections of broadcast FM radio station off planes as "passive radar". But that doesn't get much in the way of direction info, just approach velocity. I've pondered building something that uses that and correlates it with an ADS-B receiver, to see it it can detect aircraft that are not transmitting ADS-B. But that'd get me on another "list" if I published it I suspect...
This is not the project I remember, but it's the same idea and technique: https://github.com/Max-Manning/passiveRadar
In the US, ADS-B in uses 1.3 MHz of bandwidth, which would require 2.6 Msps. The ESP32-C3 running at 160 Mhz would have ~70 instructions per sample to process the data. That's probably doable, but the ESP32-C3 is one of the less capable variations of the line, and there are dual-core versions running at more than double the frequency, and those should be able to handle ADS-B in without issue.
Specifically, common PC CPUs support AES acceleration, so you can get the ongoing encryption for an established connection with minimal overhead. There is still some initial overhead for establishing the TLS connection due to the need to do key exchange (with asymmetric cryptography primitives typically based on Diffie-Hellman with finite fields or elliptic curves).
Part of the reason I've come to understand how finicky TLS is on ESP32 is because there have been a ton of TLS issues with these devices in Home Assistant [0]. The linked issue just being one of them that's still not fully resolved.
[0] https://github.com/esphome/home-assistant-voice-pe/issues/31...
Biggest problem isn’t that it’s not powerful enough, but the USB port bandwidth don’t match most SDR.
Using some clever tricks you can receive parts of the message on a slower USB and be able to decode ADS-B
Maybe I post the Rust code after some cleanup. Now I am busy build a new database from scratch to compete with them all https://github.com/punnerud/mpedb
What does that mean?
esphome can also be flashed "OTA" which just means compiling your project locally, then pushing the binary over tcp/ip and giving an instruction to install it.
With https://github.com/esphome/device-builder you can run a network of multiple esphome builders so you can update many devices at the same time "OTA" (TCP/IP).
> Can any aircraft navigation system plot drone Remote ID beacons on a map?
> How sensitive of a sensor array is necessary to trilaterate Remote ID signals and birds for aircraft collision avoidance?
Could aircraft locate birds with CSI Channel State Information?
> A Multispectral sensor array (standard) would probably be most robust.
I started working on adding weather over HTTP (or from a LoRA message from a sender key on an allow-list) to an ESP32-S3 with a 2" eInk screen with Meshtastic InkHUD. I got to testing the output on the SPI display and wrote a codec to do 1bpp 1Hz video on ESP32 and then added gaussian splatting and layers to the codec (which is brand new), so now on paper it says it can do 3D scene rendering from a configurable perspective and rescaling of normed 3x3 tensors for the display size (2x2 tensors for 2D). Haven't tested that yet but I did ask it to add sensor fusion to try to track viewer positions(s) with an Accelerometer or Ultrasonic (which this device doesn't have) or Wi-Fi CSI Channel State information. I started working on the codec, MAV (Mu Animation Video), in ffmpeg and haven't yet implemented enough device simulator pitch/roll/yaw buttons to complete testing of the 3D on ESP32 with gaussian splatting yet.
westurner/firmware: https://github.com/westurner/firmware/tree/add_weather_http_...
There's probably already a flight sim game or screensaver that will render on esp32? It looks like there are a few games in the meshtastic firmware for TFT screens but not for InkHUD eInk at 1 Hz (1 fps)
- https://makerworld.com/models/2872376-esp32-plane-radar-live... (referenced by the linked article)
- https://github.com/AnthonySturdy/micro-radar
- https://www.gadgies.co.uk/shop/p/product-3-szb2y-gzh2r-tzhkx...
Personally, I really like them. It's a nice gadget. :)