Portable, remote real time ADS-B Aircraft Radar with BeagleBone Black, RTL2832U & dump1090

ADS-B stands for Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast. Most of airplanes use this technology with Mode-S Transponder. Planes broadcast positional information (Latitude, Longitude), Altitude, Speed, Flight-stats at 1090 MHz. Further reading at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_dependent_surveillance-broadcast These broadcast messages can be heard with inexpensive hardware like RTL2832U DVB-T USB dongles. ADS-B signals can be decoded by dump1090, a good software to decode the messages in Unix systems. Here I implemented a remote real-time ADS-B Aircraft Radar with BeagleBone Black (BBB) (optional), a cheap Linux powered single board ARM computer. RTL2832U is plugged to BBB's USB. Also it is made available on local Ethernet. I'm using Ubuntu 13.04 on my BBB. Arm-hf image files and installation instructions can be found here. http://www.armhf.com/index.php/download/ RTL2832 USB drivers and dump1090 installation instructions are available here. http://www.satsignal.eu/Radio/dump1090.html Through ssh connect to your remote BBB. Next go to dump1090 folder and execute the command "./dump1090 --interactive --net" to see the live decoded broadcast messages. Open your web browser to see the real time plane positions plotted on Google maps along with altitude, speed and flight-stats information. Web browser address : http://192.168.x.x:8080 where 192.168.x.x is the IP address of your remote machine (BBB). Antenna input to the RTL2832U is the group output signal coming from GRAPH 16th group. http://www.iiap.res.in/centers/radio#grh. However we can use a simple quarter-wavelength monopole (@1090MHz) antenna for receiving the signals. As my position is remotely located, aircraft traffic is some what poor...