Dump1090 MR is a FlightAware fork of Malcolm Robb's fork of Salvatore Sanfilippo's dump1090 program. FlightAware uses it as an important element of PiAware (https://flightaware.com/adsb/piaware/), a Debian package for forwarding ADS-B data to FlightAware.
Salvatore also invented an extremely popular in-memory database called redis, among other things, and he's pretty busy and doesn't have a lot of time to jack with dump1090.
Malcolm split out dump1090's source code out into several different files and has done steady work maintaining and updgrading it. People have been sending him patches in the form of pull requests and he's been assiduously bringing them into the mainline code.
Although dump1090 is presented primarily as an ADS-B (Mode S) decoder specifically designed for these little RTLSDR USB dongles that contain a software defined radio and FPGA and were originally intended for decoding certain satellite TV broadcasts, dump1090 can do many other useful things such as
- decode and interpret ADS-B messages from various formats
- Stream ADS-B messages in various formats using Internet-standard TCP sockets
- provide a web interface to show aircraft traffic on a map in real time
- and more
Since airborne aircraft transmit their positions twice each second, ADS-B receivers located in high traffic areas can receive as many as thousands of messages each second.
Much of this information can be filtered out without a significant loss of fidelity at the receiving end. For example, an aircraft flying at a high altitude with a consistent heading and speed, the aircraft's location information can be forwarded less frequently.
Also aircraft equipped with legacy transponders, as most still are, only their altitude is being transmitted, not their latitude and longitude, etc, and as these messages aren't as useful they don't need to be sent as often.
The FlightAware fork leverages dump1090 to create a new message format that is filtered as described above plus with additional criteria and then we group multiple messages together into a single TCP packet to reduce overhead (as each IPv4 packet has a 64-byte header), ultimately requiring a small fraction of the bandwidth used by the other data formats dump1090 can send natively. This is on port 10001 by default.
Within the dump1090 repo also is a program called faup1090. When someone is running their own dump1090 or native Malcolm Robb dump1090, faup1090 can connect to dump1090, interpret the packets it receives, and translate them into the same filtered format our fork of dump1090 produces.
FlightAware's PiAware Debian package (https://flightaware.com/adsb/piaware/) leverages either faup1090 or dump1090 with additional software to connect to FlightAware with a compressed, encrypted TLS connection, log in using your FlightAware account and password, and forward your ADS-B data, where it is collected as part of FlightAware's worldwide network of Airspace National Service Providers, satellite tracking providers, networks of ADS-B providers, our FA-managed ADS-B network.
By contributing your ADS-B data to FlightAware you
- contribute to the accuracy of FlightAware's flight tracking, almost all of which is available for free worldwide through the FA website in 15 languages
- gain the ability to see a realtime picture of all ADS-B traffic FlightAware knows about
- make the Internet itself more useful
- help people communicate and share information
Every day hundreds of thousands of people save time and energy using FlightAware. If someone leaves for the airport an hour later because the flight they're meeting is an hour late, they got an hour of their life back, and that's an hour not spent in their car with the engine running or whatever. It's a win for the person, a win for the environment, and your contribution to that is palpable.
While doing this, FlightAware in no way restricts your ability to share your ADS-B data with other flight trackers.
Most people will have no need to grab dump1090/faup1090 from source code and build it. If you already have dump1090 running with some sort of ADS-B receiver, all you need to send stuff to FlightAware is to install our Debian package and configure it with your user name and password.
But for the intrepid, here is the source code, in all its glory, freely redistributable under the permissive Berkeley copyright, modifiable for your use and others, including for profit, should you desire.
We will continue to track the Malcolm Robb fork of dump1090 for the foreseeable future and maintain our modifications. We solicit any bug reports and bug fixes are, as always, for the same.
PiAware source code and instructions on build it can be found at https://github.com/flightaware/piaware.
Below is a pretty standard recipe for building and installing the libraries to talk to the RTL-SDR software defined radio USB dongle.
Following this recipe builds these with a prefix of /usr instead of the default /usr/local, because Linux. These paths are also used for (and RTL-SDR files included in) the FlightAware-sourced dump1090 install package.
sudo apt-get install libusb-1.0-0 libusb-1.0-0-dev
git clone git://git.osmocom.org/rtl-sdr.git
cd rtl-sdr
mkdir build
cd build
cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX:PATH=/usr ..
make all
sudo make install
To build dump1090...
makeTo build and install faup1090 only...
make
make -f makefaup1090 all
sudo make -f makefaup1090 install-faup1090To build and install both faup1090 and dump1090...
make
make -f makefaup1090 all
sudo make -f makefaup1090 install-faup1090 install-dump1090To build and install dump1090 and faup1090 and configure the system to start them automatically whenever the system boots
make
make -f makefaup1090 all
sudo make -f makefaup1090 full-install
Please read the original README and the Malcolm Robb ones at https://github.com/antirez/dump1090 and https://github.com/malcolmrobb/dump1090, respectively.