Estació terrestre ADS-B de baix cost a l'EETAC

Abstract

This study aims to design a system to monitor the air traffic in real-time by using a public receptor placed at EETAC. This system is an opportunity to provide a new service accessible through a website for the school that would help to promote it internationally. To implement this low-cost system working in real-time, a SDR receiver controlled by a PC has been used, through ADS-B signals which are sent out by planes at the frequency of 1090 MHz. The ADS-B signals provide the coordinates, velocity and identifier of each plane. There are two constraints concerning the system, one of which is the coverage area of the receiver (it depends on the antenna and the reception area of the UHF signal). The other constraint is related to the ADS-B technology, which is not implemented in all of the air traffic (80% in Europe approximately [1]). A SDR based on the RTL2832U chip [2] with a monopole antenna has been used. Software written by Kyle Keen [3] incorporated into rtl-sdr libraries as reception modules working on GNURadio [4], and MATLAB has been used to process the information received and to create the kml files used to locate the airplanes on a website. All of it is running on Ubuntu 16.04. The kml file is being overwritten all the time in real-time, so it is possible to see to see its trajectory. The data is presented on a HTML page which makes a request to google via geoxml3 code [5], in order to have a google earth map with the planes located. Once the user clicks over an airplane, a cloud will present the data of that airplane.