• Tag Archives aircraft

  • 3D aircraft trails

    Posted on by beno Comment

    Been busy tinkering with aircraft tracking stuff.
    One of of the more ‘pretty’ things I have done is got working a 3D map of the aircraft trails.
    Its been a bit of frustration getting this going, but it turns out that my graphics card driver was way out of date (who knew). It works Ok for day to day web browsing and text stuff, but when pushed in the graphics world, it sure matters.

    So, you can check if things are going to work Ok here; https://cesiumjs.org/troubleshooting/

    Run their little example and zoom around the world. If it all flows pretty good, then you are in with a chance to get the aircraft to show up.

    Here is a sample of what you are going to see;

    You can tilt, pan, zoom and generally move around in the whole 3D experience.

    I have set up a few URL’s to speed things up. Most of my visitors are from one of these places, so it helps them get started on their place of interest.

    3D Map Centered on Temecula
    Phoenix 3D Map centered on Phoenix
    Las Vegas 3D Map centered on Las Vegas
    Los Angeles 3D Map centered on Los Angeles International
    San Francisco 3D Map centered on Fan Francisco International


    📂This entry was posted in Computers 📎and tagged

  • New Radio

    Posted on by beno Comment

    I bought a radio to do some listening around on the ham bands, to pick up Radio Australia and lastly, to pick up aircraft data.

    https://swling.com/blog/2011/09/alinco-dx-r8t-review/

    Thankfully I got it for less than this guy, I guess by now its a few years old and the price has come down somewhat.

    So far, like the reviewer, I am very happy with it. What I am not happy with is my antenna. I really need to do something about it. Given the super small backyard etc, I am at a bit of a loss to know what to try.
    At the moment I have an end fed dipole. I think I will try a normal dipole (while we still have the two palm trees to tie the ends off on).
    It will end up a vee, but that would be better than a single long wire? I think I am just going to have to try it.


    📂This entry was posted in Computers 📎and tagged

  • ACARS

    Posted on by beno 2 Comments

    UPDATE! I am writing up instructions and Node-RED flow code on my GitHub page: https://thebaldgeek.github.io/

    Turns out that aircraft blat out more than just their positions.
    They also send a lot of short messages that anyone can receive and to some extent decode and make some sense of.
    This has been keeping me busy for the past month or so. Been really enjoying being distracted from other things, and my love of all things aircraft gets a good dose of love.
    The fact that I also use Node-RED to decode the messages is also very helpful as I needed a project to dive deeper into it.

    I started off with the freely available acrsdeco2 program and the real power of this program is that you can run remote instances of it and have it feed into a central server.
    I sent a Raspberry Pi and two receivers to my mate in Phoenix and have his data added to what I can pick up. The net results is that we have pretty much the whole area now covered with just the two receivers. More would be good and we will look at adding a few more in due course, but for now, the two systems working as one does the job.

    From there I added Node-RED. Doing a ton of reading got a lot of the abbreviations entered into the system and then I started filtering out the boring positions reports. I split off the airborne weather reports and engine reports.
    I then added several displays that showed this filtered and partly decoded information.
    The flow is by far and away the most complex I have done.

    If you would like to watch the messages, you can, just hit up the resulting node-RED dashboard; https://thebaldgeek.net:2880/ui/#/0

    The top line is just helpful data for me to see how much data we are handling. Some quick links to other parts of the system and weather stations at each location are included.
    Next is heavily filtered messages. At times I can see more than 1 message a second and they scroll past too fast to read, so I do some heavy filtering to slow the interesting stuff down.
    Next is an aircraft call sign filter. If you want to follow a specific aircraft, this is the tool to use.
    Next is the raw message. This way you can just what we are working with.
    Below that is a way to stop/ start the raw lightly decoded messages.
    Then you have the real interesting stuff. It is the result of the filter and should be interesting enough that we email it to a few of the guys and myself.
    Below that, the reports and a table of last seen (heard) aircraft.

    All in all, fascinating stuff.


    📂This entry was posted in Computers 📎and tagged