View source for Bloominglabs ADS-B

This is a page of info on getting aircraft data out of our ADS-B/MLAT receiving station at Bloominglabs. See [[Radio_Activities#ADS-B_receiving_station]] for more info on the station itself and to get access to our FlightRadar24 Premium Account.

==== Downloading aircraft data from our receiver ====
To download a static log of aircraft data from our receiver, use a web browser and connect to the unit (only from within Bloominglabs: http://192.168.1.3 ). There is no login required. You can also use wget to download a static copy of the log:
<pre>
wget -O aircraft.log http://192.168.1.3/log.php?id=xxx
</pre>

The data you want are the lines with [mlat] tags in them, in this case A4E330 is the planes id:
<pre>
2017-07-02 05:49:00 | [mlat][i] A4E330
</pre>

A quick note on extracting just the MLAT lines from the log: This is a unix one-liner which is handy for parsing just aircraft data out of the log:
<pre>
egrep -v "Pinging|Stats|sent|Registered|synchronized|Synchronizing|Cached|syncing|ping|removed|Connected to|Response|MLAT timestamp|Too many connection|[feed]|main" aircraft.log
</pre>


==== Real Time Stream ====
A real-time stream of the data can be captured from port 30003:
<pre>
$ telnet 192.168.1.3 30003
Trying 192.168.1.3...
Connected to 192.168.1.3.
Escape character is '^]'.
AIR,,333,1,A185A3,101,2017/08/10,16:20:11.4294966710,2017/08/10,16:20:11.4294966710
MSG,5,333,1,A185A3,101,2017/08/10,16:20:11.4294966710,2017/08/10,16:20:11.4294966710,,41000,,,,,,,0,,0,0
AIR,,333,2,A10897,102,2017/08/10,16:20:11.4294966723,2017/08/10,16:20:11.4294966723
AIR,,333,3,A83443,103,2017/08/10,16:20:11.4294966732,2017/08/10,16:20:11.4294966732
ID,,333,3,A83443,103,2017/08/10,16:20:11.4294966732,2017/08/10,16:20:11.4294966732,N628DC
MSG,4,333,3,A83443,103,2017/08/10,16:20:11.4294966732,2017/08/10,16:20:11.4294966732,,,196.0,47.7,,,64,,,,,
MSG,8,333,2,A10897,102,2017/08/10,16:20:11.4294966741,2017/08/10,16:20:11.4294966741,,,,,,,,,,,,0
MSG,8,333,2,A10897,102,2017/08/10,16:20:11.4294966754,2017/08/10,16:20:11.4294966754,,,,,,,,,,,,0
MSG,5,333,2,A10897,102,2017/08/10,16:20:11.4294966805,2017/08/10,16:20:11.4294966805,,16025,,,,,,,0,,0,0
AIR,,333,4,A46D4E,104,2017/08/10,16:20:11.4294966820,2017/08/10,16:20:11.4294966820
ID,,333,4,A46D4E,104,2017/08/10,16:20:11.4294966820,2017/08/10,16:20:11.4294966820,UAL1659
AIR,,333,5,AAEF89,105,2017/08/10,16:20:11.4294966829,2017/08/10,16:20:11.4294966829
ID,,333,5,AAEF89,105,2017/08/10,16:20:11.4294966829,2017/08/10,16:20:11.4294966829,AAL2197
MSG,3,333,5,AAEF89,105,2017/08/10,16:20:11.4294966829,2017/08/10,16:20:11.4294966829,,36000,,,38.39378,-87.12485,,,0,0,0,0
MSG,4,333,5,AAEF89,105,2017/08/10,16:20:11.4294966830,2017/08/10,16:20:11.4294966830,,,419.0,227.2,,,0,,,,,
AIR,,333,6,AA7E2E,106,2017/08/10,16:20:11.4294966832,2017/08/10,16:20:11.4294966832
</pre>

Other tools like socat may be better for digesting the cooked log:
<pre>
socat - TCP:192.168.1.3:30003
</pre>

Dates are in UTC, so subtract 4 hours to convert all timestamps to EDT (or -5 hours for EST). A raw/binary data stream is available on port 30334. There are 3rd party tools which can be used to digest the cooked and raw streams for visualizing some of this data.


==== Notes on data ====
Our receiver regularly pulls in beacons from aircraft over 200 nautical miles away. Technically most of the aircraft data we receive are MLAT beacons (S-mode identifiers) which is different from ADS-B. MLAT signals are usually only receivable from the ground if the aircraft is above 5k-10k feet unless direct line-of-sight was obtained. The S-mode identifier is a 24-bit hex address unique to every aircraft. Not all aircraft have beacons, although after the year 2020 the FAA will require all aircraft to have some type of identifier. 

The MLAT / S-mode / ICAO24 identifier will tie to a specific aircraft and tail number. Not all sites have a complete database, so multiple sources can be useful when looking up identifiers. These are handy to use:
* [https://www.flightradar24.com/data/aircraft https://www.flightradar24.com/data/aircraft]
* [http://www.airframes.org http://www.airframes.org] - Put the MLAT number in the "ICAO24 address" field

This site is very useful, you can do lookups here and also retrieve flight paths to see everywhere an aircraft has been logged:
* [http://www.ads-b.nl/index.php?pageno=9999 http://www.ads-b.nl/index.php?pageno=9999]

We only see occasional beacons from aircraft, so when the beacons pop-up behind it’s last known path, it means it was flying a circle around that area. The path just draws straight lines between beacon locations, so that can be somewhat misleading when a plane is circling an area.


[[Category:Radio]] [[Category:Dosman_projects]] [[Category:ADS-B]]