Mission planner has had ADSB in for a long time now, but getting an ADSB source has usually been either complicated or expensive requiring a lot of extra hardware like a pi or special receiver to do the ADSB decoding and send it to mission planner via mavlink but by running a simple program and connecting mission planner to it, we can get ADSB working in a few steps.
First get a supported SDR dongle, you dont need a specific one for ADSB, but there are specialised versions with better filtering specifically for that frequency that will get you much better detection range, I am not going that far, so im just getting the smallest one i can get
I done this about 8 years ago using a program call adsb#, but thats not available anymore and its functionality is now part of airspy software that you need to pay for.
I found rtl1090 when I went looking for an alternative, it’s basically the same as the adsb# program, an onboard adsb receiver would be nice but I haven’t found a way of doing it cheap.
it looks like MP don’t support this api directly, openskynetwork also get a free rest API, so we could probably create an issue to support them. It shouldn’t be long and would make integration easier.
adsbhub got a tcp api we can connect from MP directly but need a feeder first
While we are on the topic of APIs, integration of relevant/usable Foreflight data would be outstanding. At a glance, I don’t see an ADSB hook, but if one exists, Foreflight has the best web-based ADSB update rate I’ve seen from any app. Requires a subscription, but for those of us who use it, it’d be nice to see Mission Planner support what can be displayed.
