ads-boost

ads-boost is a decoder for ADS-B messages using software defined radio. This repository consists of two components:

• ads-boost: C++ based decoder for reading raw I/Q data from either the SDR, raw I/Q files or decoded message files. The decoded messages can be displayed in the terminal as a table of contacts and be streamed via websocket for use in e.g. the included frontend.

• frontend: react-based webapp to display the contact table in the browser as well as displaying the corresponding aircraft on a map.

Features:

• Streaming of current contacts via websocket using uWebSockets

• Configurable tile server for the custom maps, such as OpenStreetMap

• Easy to extend to new SDRs, currently only supports RTL-SDR

• Read/Write raw I/Q data and/or demodulated ADS-B messages

Getting started

First, you need to clone this repository

git clone https://github.com/christophmeyer/ads-boost.git

cd ads-boost

and update the submodules with

git submodule update --init --recursive

Build and run decoder from source

First, the dependencies need to be installed, as an example here is how to install them on ubuntu:

apt-get update \
    && apt-get install -y --no-install-recommends cmake \
    build-essential \
    zlib1g-dev \
    librtlsdr-dev \
    libgtest-dev

Then, to compile the decoder run the following

mkdir backend/build
cd backend/build
cmake .. && cmake --build .

The build can be verified by running the tests

./test_runner

To run the decoder and display the current contacts in a table in the terminal, run

./ads-boost -c

If you want to run the frontend against the decoder, you need to start the decoder with the -n to broadcast the contacts via websocket. The port can be specified with -p, e.g.

./ads-boost -n -p 9001

For an overview of all options use

./ads-boost --help

Build and run webserver from source

Either run the webserver in development mode with

cd frontend/app
yarn install
yarn start

or build the app with

cd frontend/app
yarn build

Then it can be served with e.g. nginx. The tile server (for the map) and ads-boost decoder URLs are specified in ./frontend/app/.env.development.local (when run with yarn start) or in ./frontend/app/.env.production.local (when build with yarn build, also used for docker image, see below).

Docker setup

For the docker setup, the URLs of the tile server and ads-boost decoder are baked into the frontend image. They can be changed in ./frontend/app/.env.production.local.

Build the docker images with

docker-compose build

For correctly decoding ground position messages, the coordinates of the decoder need to be set in ./.env. Then the services can be started with

docker-compose up

which runs the both the decoder and webserver which per default gets exposed on port 80.

Limitations / Todos:

• Only supports for RTL-SDR for now, but should be easy to extend to others
• No error correction (invalid messages get discarded)
• No support for downlink formats other than the ADS-B downlink formats 17 and 18
• Messages with type-code 28 and 31 not implemented yet
• Only tested on Ubuntu 20.04

Credits/Resources:

• THE 1090 MEGAHERTZ RIDDLE by Junzi Sun is a good resource to get started on ADS-B decoding
• The demodulation algorithm in this repo is somewhat inspired by the classic dump1090