Looking for a way to view recent history in my local airport area. Trying to find info on airplane flying surveillance over our farm
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It is possible to look up the history of a specific flight, if you have the right account.
Note that if your farm is not in controlled airspace then a transponder is not required to be on. Also, with the quality of cameras today, it is fairly easy to take photos from an altitude where you wouldn’t even hear or see an aircraft. It is also possible to be high and miles away and take quality pictures(Look at google earth pics from space and they are from 450KM or 280 Miles up).
Not looking for a specific flight. Just all flights in that area at a certain time. What kind of account?
It’s complicated but if one has some programming know-how, and aren’t intimidated by writing bash shell scripts, crontab jobs, Python code, a few external libraries, and a menagerie of open source GIS mapping tools, you can DIY it.
The PiAware doesn’t save more than an hour of heard data points, as .json data.
However, I wrote a little shell script that triggers hourly with crontab that zips up all 120 of the .json files and makes a filename and path to save it based on the date and time. The goal was to have a bunch of historical data even though I still don’t have the other code written and debugged to sift through it yet.
I periodically SFTP download it to a desktop to save space on the Pi, and have filled up quite a few gigabytes of data in the past 2 years, just waiting for me to write the code that will parse through it.
I think I found a Python library to import that can quickly go through .json data. What I plan to do then is make a pass through an entire day’s worth of data, build a list of unique tail numbers, then make a time stamped track out of the points from each tail number or ICAO number.
A parallel task is to sift through and parse for lat / long / altitude data that falls within a specific “box”, and make a list of tail / ICAO numbers that passed through the box that day, then select those captured tracks and convert to KML to view on Google Earth, or something QGIS can easily digest and display on a map type of my choosing.
The other local capture method is to connect to the Pi DUMP1090 server and get live data in certain formats depending on which port you connect to - you can get BEAST binary format, I think JSON, and I know I stumbled on CSV format and set up a script on a local desktop to save all that to the hard drive, as I found thousands of these neatly organized by date / time but have to locate my notes to recall exactly which port it was.
I think I also found some DUMP978 data as well but I’ve got to examine the desktop’s crontab and the scripts that are triggered on bootup and hourly, as well as the ps command output (linux) to figure out what I set in motion and never quite finished.
But I’d search the forums here for capture and parsing of BEAST and json data externally as it comes from the PiAware. Someone posted a list of ports and links to some open source projects that may either do exactly what you want, or can be used as a front end that you can then pass to other programs for further processing.
First is to capture your local data, though. Even if it takes a year to find / write the code to process it, once it’s on a local hard drive you have plenty of time to play around with the data.
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