ADSB for mission planner just using an SDR dongle

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


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Download the RTL1090.EXE VERSION 2 from here https://rtl1090.com/

Download these files
RelWithDebInfo(1).zip (416.4 KB)

Unzip and copy rtl-sdr-release\x32\rtlsdr.dll, msvcr100.dll and libusb-1.0.dll to RTL1090 folder

Download Zadig and open it,
https://zadig.akeo.ie/
click options,
click list all devices,
click bulk interface 0
click install WinUSB driver

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close Zadig.

open RTL1090

start RTL1090

Open mission planner and click on ADSB in the CONFIG > PLANNER tab.
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Click OK.

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Enter the port number from the bottom of RTL1090 and click OK.

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You now have ADSB.

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I did the docker version some time ago. Their wiki got a lot of good information about antenna and tuning : Learning ADS-B Technology: A DIY Guide

About range, with the adsbexchange key and a 3db antenna, I got about 200km from my home roof !

2 Likes

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.

@geofrancis, thanks for the detailed write up!