Your Pi already tracks planes. What if it could stream ATC too

FlightAware ADS-B Flight Tracking
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Hey everyone,

I’ve been running PiAware for a while and always had SDR++ open on my laptop to listen to Auckland ATC while watching the planes. It drove me crazy that they were two separate things.

So I built PiLNK.

It runs on your existing Raspberry Pi alongside PiAware. Add a second RTL-SDR dongle for VHF audio and you get live ATC streaming + ADS-B tracking in one beautiful interface. Click any airport, tune any frequency, watch the planes and hear them talking — simultaneously.

30,000 PiAware stations worldwide. Imagine if they all shared ATC audio. That’s where this is heading.

:link: pilnk.io :star: GitHub - slingb1ade/PiLNK: Files for the PiLNK software suite. · GitHub

Still early days — would love feedback from the community!

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Hi guys

Just a quick update on PiLNK. the UI is almost done but is up and running as it has for the week or so. It’s completely usable now we’re just finishing up a few little tweaks to a few areas and the audio panel.

The plan is to have it available for testing soon. We’re going to start off with a closed beta then rolling it out to and open beta. If you are interesting in helping test a brand new app, please let me know.

Cheers

AJ

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After installation, I tried python3 app.py and got:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/home/pi/pilnk/app.py", line 4, in <module>
    from radio import RadioStream
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'radio'

The on-line AI assistant didn’t help much.

Edit to add:
I did a reboot, but then couldn’t log back into the RPi. Disconnected the ATC SDR dongle and cycled power to get back into the RPi.

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Hey, thanks so much for your interest in PiLNK — and for actually diving in and trying it! Really appreciate the enthusiasm.

You’ve hit a known issue — a couple of the core modules aren’t in the repo yet as we’re still tidying things up for the beta release. The project is very much working (I’m running it live right now!) but it’s not quite ready for a clean install from scratch.

We’re aiming to have a proper closed beta ready very soon — complete with a one-line installer so none of this applies. I’ll be posting here when sign-ups open and would love to have you as one of the first testers.

Thanks again for being keen — exactly the kind of community energy that makes open source worth building! :raising_hands:

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