#Flightradar24

Now running a Flightradar24 receiver in Singapore: T-WSAP38. Range is fairly limited due to surrounding buildings and not having an amplificator on the antenna. Not much I can do about that for now.

Stats here – click on top users: Yeri (#13 atm).

Flightradar24 (T-EBBR55) antenna being installed right next to BRU airport.

Due to interference (GSM? WiFi (very very unlikely)? High voltage power lines?) we moved it to the side, as seen below.

While it is blind from half a side, it can see all the way up to London and beyond.

This is the result:

I had to wait a little while for the ARMv7 version for my EfikaMX devices, but they finally had time to compile it. Yay!

The updated cookbooks are on Github.

Changes (commits):

• Better key management
• fr24feed.ini
• No more separate dump1090 launch
• newest fr24 version

Here’s my very simple Ansible playbook for Flightradar24 nodes.

While I run it on EfikaMX, it should work on most Debian based devices. Just be sure to modify the FR24 software download URL.

This Ansible playbook is untested on its own. It comes out of a way bigger (private) Ansible playbook, and I kind of just copy pasted this part, as others might benefit from it.

After running Ansible, you should reboot for driver blacklisting to work in cases it’s needed on your device (it is on RPis). And be sure to edit /root/flightradar24.sh with your key.

In a couple of lines: how to get FR24 (+ dump1090) to work on your Raspberry Pi.

Be sure to have the right hardware: flightradar24.com/dvbt-stick and … obviously … a RPi.

I got a NooElec from Amazon because I didn’t have the patience to wait for something (that might not work) from AliExpress.

As root:

apt-get update && apt-get install cmake gcc pkg-config libusb-1.0 make git-core libc-dev git clone git://git.osmocom.org/rtl-sdr.git cd rtl-sdr mkdir build cd build cmake ../ -DINSTALL_UDEV_RULES=ON make && make install ldconfig cd ../..