I’ve been detecting and archiving ADS-B position reports from airplanes flying over Prince Edward Island for the last 18 hours; here’s a map of what my little Raspberry Pi has picked up:
That’s a simple visualization of the positions recorded created using GeoJSON.io. To allow me to see individual planes’ tracks, I dumped the data points into a CSV file, edited it, and then ran it through GPS Visualizer:
There were 1,095 position reports received from 37 distinct flights (here’s the raw data should you wish to experiment with it yourself):
- AAL42
- AAL50
- AAL78
- AAL80
- AAL86
- ACA848
- ACA878
- AWE722
- AWE750
- AZA610
- AZA65F
- BAW196
- BAW81V
- CJT621
- DAL24
- DAL72
- DLH425
- DLH431
- DLH435
- EIN104
- EIN138
- ETD150
- FDX36
- ICE630
- KLM18
- N800J
- NAX7012
- QTR764
- QTR8102
- SAS926
- SWR52
- THY18A
- UAL114
- UAL126
- UAL58
- VIR12E
- WJA424
You can enter those flight numbers into Google, or into FlightAware, and see the flight details: when you do this you’ll notice that the vast majority of the flights were flying above 30,000 feet and were heading to or from Europe: none of the local flights from Charlottetown Airport were detected, likely because the ADS-B receiver I’m using is on the windowsill over my office downtown, and doesn’t have line-of-sight to local flight paths.
My next step, thus, is to put an antenna up on the roof.