Some years ago, I bumped into an article on Mashable about Jeremy Merrill using a Raspberry Pi ADS-B tracker to detect aircraft flying over his house and display the origin or destination of that plane (see article here and github there). As my place is just on a busy plane corridor, that gave me an idea. I decided to work on a similar project based on Piaware. Looking at how he did it and at the long literature you can find on the web on ADS-B, I created this site, my own software in Python to run on my Pi and other fun stuffs. I also ran into this site by SonicGoose and that gave me many new ideas (including the basic structure of this site – I never had any experience of html or php before).

One key part is getting access to aircraft databases to get more info from the ModeS hex code you get from the Piaware tracker. I am sharing my own database of planes, airports and routes I detected with one of my trackers (I have a fixed one at home, another one in Briancon in France (solar powered and connected by SigFox!) and a mobile one I take with me during my trips over the world).

When I started few years ago, I didn’t know that it will become such a fun project!

Updates

[2019/02] Update of installation script and new links
[2019/05] Update of the Radar page that now use my own positions database. Added aircraft silhouettes and Airlines logo.
[2019/05] Changed the domain to FoxtrotCharlie.ovh !!!
[2019/06] Changed landing page and reworked index for Google
[2019/07] Added Great Circle tracks between origin, destination and seen positions on Radar
[2019/09] Added Airports data, API page, better sitemap for Google index

[2020/01] Added a solar powered ADS-B tracker in Briancon, with a SigFox interface by SNOC to send new / special planes to this database when Wifi is off – works great!
Running an ADS-B tracker on a solar panel is quite challenging. After some research, I believed a 20W solar panel would be enough, but the stick consumption is very high, and solar energy production is far from stable… after few month using it, I would need about 80W to be able to power the system for 24h (Raspberry Pi 4 + Flightaware Pro Stick Plus + SNOC SigFox). SigFox is a great solution to replace a 4G modem which would also take too much energy. The limitation to 6 messages per hour is manageable, as I am only reporting new or special planes to this website, while the detailed data are stored and shared when the device has access to wifi. The biggest issue I didn’t plan for was that the Pi doesn’t have a RTC, so time was wrong (it only progress when the Pi is on, about 8 to 12h per day… after few days, it was completely off). Hopefully, I could also use the downlink SigFox messages to get the network time and update the Pi time at each boot. Here the limitation is at 4 messages per day. It is controlled by the callback feature so it is quite easy to be sure you will not exceed the budget, even with a Pi with no idea what is current date or time. Next step is to work on shuting down properly the Pi when battery is low in order to avoid memory issue. So far it works with multiple wild shutdowns per day, but I don’t know for how long.
[2020/02] Updated the stats page to show more details
[2020/03] Added tweets on Sigfox interface with Briancon tracker
[2020/07] Working on adding MoPi-2 on the solar powered tracker to allow clean power down. Changed all the time in UTC. With trackers everywhere, it doesn’t make sens anymore to be on Hong Kong time.
[2020/09] Added a new blog. Let’s hope I will post regularly from now on!
[2020/10] API optimisation – reduced the errors from 2% to 0.05%
[2020/11] New landing page with a RSS feed reader to get up to date links to my blog posts. Let’s see the impact on Search ranking!

[2021/08] My database on Unknown Mode S codes is now searchable, as well as my complete database of Mode S codes, even those I have never detected with my trackers. Also added a page to show the latest Unknown Mode S detected. It shows when at least one tracker detected them first and last.

Interesting links