I started to learn about radios a few years ago, and slowly picking up enough DSP knowledge to write 1-2 decoders (mostly for satellite signals).

This project of mine is an ADS-B receiver that works with an SDR dongle connected to your Pc. It receives nearby aircraft signals, short data sequences sent on 1090MHz. These packets tells us about the aricraft’s identifier, position, speed etc.

I focused on the signal decoding part, mostly to get bits out of the raw IQ stream provided by the SDR. That is the most useful part for me.

I used a stock python library to parse the data and ported (AI) the mapSCII library from JavaScript so that I can show the aircrafts in a nice map in the terminal.

The mapSCII port is available in pypi as a separate package. I think that’s the most valuable part of this experiment for others.

Otherwise, I enjoy looking at the planes moving around in the console. I use a mac and know that Windows is more picky when it comes to ANSI stuff and unicode, but it might work as well.