aperture: tracking ships and aircraft over SF Bay with a $25 SDR dongle
After a few days of 433 MHz weather sensors, I pointed the same RTL-SDR Blog V4 ($25, secondhand off Craigslist) at San Francisco Bay: three long AIS runs for ships (they broadcast around 162 MHz) and one ADS-B run for aircraft (1090 MHz). I’m an electrical engineer but new to software-defined radio, so parts of this are me finding things out; outside knowledge is linked inline. Where I could, I compared what the software decoded with something outside my own capture, and every run’s date and time is in the table at the end so my numbers can be checked. ...