Do you want to build your Airplane tracker by yourself? It’s easy and it’s realtime, not delayed like flightradar24.

What do you need?

• A DVB-T Stick with a RTL-Based Chip like this one ( also usable for other SDR projects)
• A piece of Software like dump1090 to read the ADS-B information.

Here are the steps for Linux/Unix Systems:
Download and unzip the Software:

wget https://github.com/antirez/dump1090/archive/master.zip
unzip master.zip

Change into the unzipped directory and execute make:

cd dump1090-master/
make

Plug in your DVB-T stick and launch dump1090:

./dump1090 --interactive --net

The option “interactive” tells the program to output planes with automatically refreshed screen every second
The option “net” enables networking support.

After a few seconds you should see the first planes:

You can even connect with your webbrowser to http://127.0.0.1:8080 to see the planes on a map.

Now you should see planes near you. It’s best to go outside with your antenna to track airplanes. You can even build better antennas 😉 See the links below.

Happy plane tracking!

DIY Antenna: ADS-B wine cork antenna
Or if you use Windows see this post here: dump1090 on Windows