Hello,
I’m using this flightaWare stuff since more than 10 years with good result and success.
I’m now flying with a Parrot Disco (normally under 1000 feet of course), but i noticed several time small aircraft like DR-400 Cessnaor hospital helicopter flying at 600 feet !
I’m thinking to have a small Rpi with screen for field with i fly with my drone Parrot disco BUT the issue is that all this small local aircraft don’t have ADS-B mode with GPS but only Mode S transponder so i can see them in the list but i cannot locate them on the map.
Question 1 : the dream : Can i have a Beep Alarm if air traffic in my 1 kilometer circle ? (i don’t care of Commercial 33000 feet high), i just want to land is small aircraft or helicopter is coming
Question 2: how can i locate the Mode S transponder ? does MLAT help ? can i set a Flightaware at home and another one in the field when i fly my drone ?
Thanks in advance for your precious help
Kind Regards
seb
You can do what you want with some limitations, but you’d probably need to write scripts to do it. There might be something someone else has done, but I’m not aware of it.
Your second question is the first thing - MLAT will help with getting a position for mode S only aircraft, however you will need to have an active internet connection and accurate position for it to work if you want it locally. You’d need to be in a location that other receivers also cover for mlat to work, but its not guaranteed you’ll get a position for every aircraft. You can improve the chances by connecting to several mlat networks that feed results back to you - one of them might give you are result where another might not.
The problem with light aircraft is that being low flying, you need a higher density of mlat receivers to get good coverage, because you have shorter reception range for aircraft at low altitude.
You could also take data from your home receiver if you are getting good mlat coverage of the area of interest.
Your first question is possible providing you have access to the data, but would require a script to pull that data and do something with it. It doesn’t matter whether it’s from a local device, or from your home receiver. It would need to have some method of determining your location, so either a manual input or gps receiver, and then use that to compare your location to the list of received aircraft.
Once you have that, you can output the data however you like - sound, on a screen or whatever, but you’d probably need to write the script yourself.
