With the soon to be mandate of the ADSB, many people are exploring the use of software defined radios to capture the data real time and have a near instantaneous picture of the air traffic around them. The radios themselves are simple dongles that can be purchased from Amazon or from companies like NooElec. For those wanting to use it remotely, you can add a Raspbery pi and stream it over wifi. All of the hardware and software required to get up and going can cost you under $13. There's multiple freeware programs that are able to convert the ADSB data and put it onto a map so you can see real time locations of the aircraft.

My idea is to integrate it with my Zaon Pcas (company is now out of business) to give a pseudo passive radar. Between the mode S and the Zaon, it would give a good picture of the air traffic in the area (for those with their transponders active).

Has anyone else out there messed around with these or tried integrating other pieces of software? The other thought is to integrate a second receiver to receive TIS-B information which would negate the need for the use of the PCAS system. Once all this is worked out on the ground, one could use a windows tablet which can be had for $~100 and panel mounted to give a complete ADSB picture and information for well less than the cost of an Ipad alone.

#include <stdio.h>

int main()
{
printf("Hello, ADSB!\n");
}

I setup my android tablet to get ADSB traffic -worked well showing aircraft around Vancouver -it doesn't show on screenshot but you can get detail on each aircraft -call sign etc. About $25 total for h/w and s/w.
I believe it is just picking up 1090ES direct from the aircraft - not sure if it would pick up ground station rebroadcast.

This is definitely a fun idea. The problem is that the ground will only transmit primary contacts around aircraft that transmit adsb-out. To bad it's probably way illegal to homebrew adsb-out.

The trouble with all that stuff is that it encourages you to keep your eyes inside the cockpit, instead of looking out the window for other traffic. I remember one day listening to somebody talking on 122.75 to his buddy-- he said he was doing 200 knots and kept talking about his TCAS display. Since those things work on txp signals, I could just imagine him running right over an old J3 or Champ because he "failed to maintain an adequate lookout". No thanks.

Personally if the mandate doesn't go away (I keep hoping), I'm gonna get just an ADS-B out box (the cheapest legal one I can find) and continue to fly in "see and avoid" mode.

I have to agree with hotrod180. Unless you fly with a copilot “ADS-B In” is a bad idea IMO.

I recently turned on my Stratus 2, after not having used it for at least six months, because I knew I was going over Austin during a push. Sure enough targets popped up everywhere, some at/near my altitude coming in my general direction. All of a sudden I was looking at my iPad then at the sky, iPad, sky, iPad, sky, iPad, sky. Most of the time I could never find the aircraft, even when they were close enough to set off an alert in Foreflight. I’d be FAR better off looking out the cockpit and keeping my head on a swivel.

What about ADS-B weather? For a backcountry pilot it’s worthless, again IMO. You have to be at least 2,500 AGL to receive it and if you are 2,500 AGL you are not backcountry flying, you’re crosscountry flying. And when I’m crosscountry or backcountry flying my cell service is far more reliable then ADS-B. Talking the lower 48 here.

Sorry for the thread drift but hotrod180 started it.

That's OK, just throw me under the bus and be on your way.

8GCBC wrote:#include <stdio.h>

int main()
{
printf("Hello, ADSB!\n");
}

well played.

I'm all about government bashing for stupid requirements and I am also a firm believer in the see and avoid style of flying. Believe it or not I'm also young and was raised up with most of the technology. however, the point of the thread is more about the exploitation piece of this. My idea is having a pseudo radar to have a bigger picture of what's going on when we have fly ins or whatnot. There's many people (including hackers) out there that seem to have taken in interest in ADS-B because it is so easy to exploit. I'm working on getting ahead of the power curve before this system becomes mandatory. In case you haven't been tracking, majority of this "cheaper" adsb equipment has been steadily increasing in price. The navwox 600exp started out at $699, the price is now up to $1050 just for the receiver. that doesn't include the antennas or harness or any of the extras.

In reality I'll be waiting around up until the deadline (or maybe even past) as technology is only going to get better and cheaper (Moore's law will most likely play into that). I almost pulled the trigger on putting in full glass this month, but decided to wait. the only bonus I see at this point is to have full engine monitoring and feel better about flying IFR if the need arises.

hotrod180 wrote:That's OK, just throw me under the bus and be on your way.

LMAO!!!!

I have had one set up on my home PC and spent considerable time messing with it. While it is an interesting toy I don't believe it would be useful enough at this time unless you only wanted to watch airliner and other heavy traffic. Very few little planes are using ADSB now.

Robots Will Always Need Us
By NICHOLAS CARRMAY 20, 2015

“HUMAN BEINGS are ashamed to have been born instead of made,” wrote the philosopher Günther Anders in 1956. Our shame has only deepened as our machines have grown more adept.

Every day we’re reminded of the superiority of our computers. Self-driving cars don’t fall victim to distractions or road rage. Robotic trains don’t speed out of control. Algorithms don’t suffer the cognitive biases that cloud the judgments of doctors, accountants and lawyers. Computers work with a speed and precision that make us look like bumbling slackers.

It seems obvious: The best way to get rid of human error is to get rid of humans.

But that assumption, however fashionable, is itself erroneous. Our desire to liberate ourselves from ourselves is founded on a fallacy. We exaggerate the abilities of computers even as we give our own talents short shrift.

It’s easy to see why. We hear about every disaster involving human fallibility — the chemical plant that exploded because the technician failed to open a valve, the plane that fell from the sky because the pilot mishandled the yoke — but what we don’t hear about are all the times that people use their expertise to avoid accidents or defuse risks.

Pilots, physicians and other professionals routinely navigate unexpected dangers with great aplomb but little credit. Even in our daily routines, we perform feats of perception and skill that lie beyond the capacity of the sharpest computers. Google is quick to tell us about how few accidents its autonomous cars are involved in, but it doesn’t trumpet the times the cars’ backup drivers have had to take the wheel. Computers are wonderful at following instructions, but they’re terrible at improvisation. Their talents end at the limits of their programming.

Human skill has no such constraints. Think of how Capt. Chesley B. Sullenberger III landed that Airbus A320 in the Hudson River after it hit a flock of geese and its engines lost power. Born of deep experience in the real world, such intuition lies beyond calculation. If computers had the ability to be amazed, they’d be amazed by us.

While our flaws loom large in our thoughts, we view computers as infallible. Their scripted consistency presents an ideal of perfection far removed from our own clumsiness. What we forget is that our machines are built by our own hands. When we transfer work to a machine, we don’t eliminate human agency and its potential for error. We transfer that agency into the machine’s workings, where it lies concealed until something goes awry.

Computers break down. They have bugs. They get hacked. And when let loose in the world, they face situations that their programmers didn’t prepare them for. They work perfectly until they don’t.

Many disasters blamed on human error actually involve chains of events that are initiated or aggravated by technological failures. Consider the 2009 crash of Air France Flight 447 as it flew from Rio de Janeiro to Paris. The plane’s airspeed sensors iced over. Without the velocity data, the autopilot couldn’t perform its calculations. It shut down, abruptly shifting control to the pilots. Investigators later found that the aviators appeared to be taken by surprise in a stressful situation and made mistakes. The plane, with 228 passengers, plunged into the Atlantic.

The crash was a tragic example of what scholars call the automation paradox. Software designed to eliminate human error sometimes makes human error more likely. When a computer takes over a job, the workers are left with little to do. Their attention drifts. Their skills, lacking exercise, atrophy. Then, when the computer fails, the humans flounder.

In 2013, the Federal Aviation Administration noted that overreliance on automation has become a major factor in air disasters and urged airlines to give pilots more opportunities to fly manually. The best way to make flying even safer than it already is, the research suggests, may be to transfer some responsibility away from computers and back to people. Where humans and machines work in concert, more automation is not always better.

We’re in this together, our computers and ourselves. Even if engineers create automated systems that can handle every possible contingency — far from a sure bet — it will be years before the systems are fully in place. In aviation, it would take decades to replace or retrofit the thousands of planes in operation, all of which were designed to have pilots in their cockpits. The same goes for roads and rails. Infrastructure doesn’t change overnight.

We should view computers as our partners, with complementary abilities, not as our replacements. What we’ll lose if we rush to curtail our involvement in difficult work are the versatility and wisdom that set us apart from machines.

The world is safer than ever, thanks to human ingenuity, technical advances and thoughtful regulations. Computers can help sustain that progress. Recent train crashes, including the Amtrak derailment this month, might have been prevented had automated speed-control systems been in operation. Algorithms that sense when drivers are tired and sound alarms can prevent wrecks.

The danger in dreaming of a perfectly automated society is that it makes such modest improvements seem less pressing — and less worthy of investment. Why bother taking small steps forward, if utopia lies just around the bend?