ADSB.im

In general, the basic setup should make it very quick to get you started. The bare minimum of information is entered on the Basic Setup page, by default it assumes that you want to track planes via ADS-B and it auto-assigns a single SDR for that purpose, and you can select aggregators on the Data Sharing page.

On basically every page of the interface there is a link to the Feeder Homepage in the top left corner - depending on the screen size that's either just a logo or a logo with the text ADS-B Feeder or SDR Feeder next to it.

On the home page you will see one or more buttons in the top menu bar that will take you to the various map interfaces for ADS-B, ACARS, AIS, and Radiosonde (but only those that you have enabled will be shown). Clicking on one of these buttons will get you to a protocol specific UI that isn't part of the ADSB.im web interface, but instead part of the user interface for the underlying tools that we use in order to handle data for the various protocols.

[to be completed] -- add links to walk through of tar1090, acarshub, ais-catcher, and radiosonde auto rx

On the right side of the top menu bar there are more links to UI components - either as traditional menu bar or collapsed to a hamburger menu on small screens. The first menu item gives you access to more Maps, again, depending on the enabled protocols. Next to that the Data Sharing links allows you to select the aggregators that you want to send data to.

The Setup dropdown menu lets you get back to Basic Settings, setup the SDRs that are connected to your system, or enter the secondary setup screen named Expert.

Finally, the last element is the System dropdown menu. This is where you can get to the Logs of the various services (most users never need those, but they are critical to debug some issues users may run into), the Support Info that you will almost certainly be asked to provide when asking for help with an issue and a way to share very detailed diagnostics with the developers using the Share Diagnostics item.

The Management menu item opens a system management UI that will be discussed in detail below. Backup and Restore links are also in this menu, as well as the Stats link that opens a screen with system statistics (this isn't available at the very start of the setup, yet).

For an ADS-B feeder, the first section of the Feeder Homepage shows you information about the data you are receiving. The current number of positions and messages per second as well as the number of planes that you are tracking right now as well as the number of planes total since midnight UTC. The choice of resetting the daily number based on Universal Time (UTC) and not local time is based on the common practice of most aggregators to use this to calculate daily planes tracked.

Below that you'll see a graph that shows the number of planes tracked per (UTC) day (extending up to two weeks). And below that you can see the aggregators that you have enabled either with the selection of default account-less aggregators as part of Basic Setup, or with more detailed selections on the Data Sharing page as well as their current status as seen by the feeder. This data can take a few minutes to update and unfortunately isn't always correct as the aggregators don't always manage to provide accurate information from their backend systems. For those aggregators where it is reasonably easy to do so, a link to the aggregator's status page is also shown. An explanation of the various status icons is below that table.

The ADSB.im Feeder Software allows you to either update to a stable or beta version with convenient buttons on the Feeder Homepage. Below those buttons is a toggle to show the ChangeLog information for these new releases. You can also set up your system to automatically update when new versions become available. This setting can be found under System -> Management.

For an ADS-B feeder, below the update section are links to the various map options that are offered, as well as links to specific personalized URLs from the various aggregatros (if any).

Finally, on the bottom of each page there is a footer that shows the current version you are running, information about the hardware you are running it on and how you initially installed the software, plus links to this documentation, the ADSB.im YouTube channel, as well as the Zulip and Discord channels where you can find people to talk to about this software.

On the Map Options page you are offered a few ways to adjust what you see when showing the ADS-B live map.

By default, the ADSB Feeder Image shows the best (open data based) guess for the route information of the planes shown in the live map user interface as highlighted here on the right side of the screenshot. Currently this data is created on the ADSB.im backend server by analyzing historical data from aggregators and parsing the live ACARS and VDL2 messages collected by airframes.io. If you don't want the route information shown on the live map, you can turn it off here.

Based on your location and elevation of the antenna it is possible to create a fairly accurate model for how far away a good ADS-B receiver can "see" planes, depending on their altitude. The HeyWhatsThat website allows you to create outlines for this theoretical range of an ideal antenna at your location. The map shows an orange outline for the range for low flying planes and several more outlines in yellow, green, blue, purple, and pink for increasingly higher altitudes. This outline is theoretical as it doesn't include real world obstructions like buildings or large trees in its calculations, but it's usually a good enough approximation. If you want to create such a range outline and have it displayed on the live map, go to HeyWhatsThat, enter your location and create an ID which you can then enter here.

The live map will also show a (darker green, slightly thicker) range outline that shows you the area around your location where you have received plane data from. If you want to reset that "actual range" outline, there's an option to do that here. Note that the range outline by default always tracks the last 24 hours of data, so things will reset on their own after a day.

On the Data Sharing page you are adjusting how your data is shared with aggregators. The options available here depend on which protocols you have enabled.

For ADS-B, by default, MLAT privacy is not enabled, which allows (a rough estimate of the location of) your site to be shown on typical MLAT coverage maps. Turning this on informs the aggregators that you would like to opt out of having your data shown on such maps.
The rest of this page is used to select the aggregators you want to feed. The first group are the account-less aggregators that don't require any authentication. Below them are the various commercial and non-commercial aggregators for which you need some kind of sharing key or similar. For many of them, getting those key is automated, others require some extra steps -- see the help texts in the UI.

For ACARS, VDL2, and HFDL, there are only a few choices available.

For AIS there are a larger number of both community based and commercial options available.

For RadioSonde at this point there appears to be only one interesting aggregator SondeHub which is enabled by default and not shown on this page.

[to be completed]

The Basic Setup item brings you back to the initial setup - useful if you want to change the name of your site or if you move the antenna and need to adjust the location.

On the SDR setup page you can assign the SDRs found in your system to the enabled protocols. By default only ADS-B is assumed as enabled, you can add support for additional protocols in the Expert settings below.

For each of the SDRs, you can click on its entry in the table and then select which protocol it is used for and (depending on the type of SDR and the sepecific usage) select values for gain and potentially enable biastee support. Note that generally only one SDR can be used for each protocol, so assigning an SDR to a protocol that was already assigned to a different SDR will change the assignment of that previous SDR to "other".

Once all SDRs have been assigned, you must click on the "Apply Settings" button to actually apply the changes.

On the Expert page you will find some more advanced settings. There are two main sections: first the odd settings that will be fairly specific to certain users, and then the section that allows you to enable non-ADS-B protocols. Arguably the "Expert" page is maybe not the most logical place to enable these features, but for now that's where they are.

In some very unusual circumstances you may want to be able to add additional arguments for the Ultrafeeder, e.g., if you are feeding a "standard aggregator" that accelpts beast input but for whatever reason isn't supported by the web UI.

Similarly, if you want to access some features that don't have UI elements to support them, sometimes you can enable them using specific environment variables -- definitely an expert use case. Along the same lines you can add default arguments for the ADS-B live map. To learn more about the environment variables and arguments that are available, see the Ultrafeeder documentation. Please note that it become significantly harder for the team behind the feeder image to help you if you use either of these options, so by going down that path you are decidedly in expert territory and may be on your own.

Speaking of truly advanced use cases, if you use a Raspberry Pi SBC and have connected a DHT22 temperature sensor to its GPIO pins, you can enable ambient temperature reporting. By default the software assumes that the DATA pin of the DHT22 is connected to GPIO 4. If you cannot use that GPIO pin, you can change the PIN used by creating a file /opt/adsb/extras/adsb-temperature.default with the content GPIO_PIN=22 (or whatever GPIO pin you are using).

If you want to share your ADS-B live map with others (generally only recommended if you really understand the potentially unintended consequences - hence, again, an expert use case), you can disable the config link on the ADS-B live map.

You can switch the CSS Theme from the default that tries to match your current browse theme to light or dark.

For very specific situations with limited bandwidth networks, you can disable parallel downloads of Docker containers.

Finally, as mentioned above, you can enable the various non-ADS-B protocols. Each of these need to first be enabled clicking the corresponding "Enable" button, and then you can set the corresponding feed IDs for each protocol -- these IDs are required as they are used to identify the feed for the respective aggregators. The most common convention for these feed IDs is to use your initials (two or three letters) followed by the ICAO code of the closest airport followed by the protocol you are sending (and a number to distinguish multiple instances if necessary). For example AM-EDDF-VDL2 for a hypothetical Andreas Müller sending VDL2 messages near Frankfurt International Airport.

ACARS supports two different instances (with separate feed IDs) as in some geographies (mostly the US) there are more ACARS frequencies in use than a single SDR can cover. The default frequencies for the two ACARS instances are designed that the first one by default covers all the common frequencies around the world, and the second one covers the frequencies below 130MHz that are mainly seen in the US (and even there they are not very common). So for most people having just one ACARS decoder is likely sufficient.

VDL Mode 2 (or VDL2) is the more modern, digital protocol for airplane messaging. In many areas (especially in Europe) VDL2 has surpassed analog ACARS messages in terms of message volume, but in other areas ACARS may still get you more messages. A single antenna with two SDRs can cover both VDL2 and ACARS. Once again, the default frequencies are most likely sufficient for most people.

HFDL is operating at much lower frequencies than ACARS and VDL2 and therefore definitely requires its own antenna - but on the flip side you typically can receive messages from significantly further away as HF radio signals tend to get reflected and follow the curvature of earth to some degree. The Feeder Image supports two primary ways to receive HFDL messages: first with a standard SDR and a frequency scanning script that is integrated and usually does a fairly good job identifying the right frequencies to listen on. So again, leaving frequencies unset is likely the best starting point. You do need to set a different sample rate depending on your SDR. Typical RTLSDRs are handled automatically, for an Airspy you need to enter 3000000.

The other option for receiving HFDL messages is to use hfdlobvserver, which requires access to a web-888 SDR on your local network. This is definitely a bit of a corner case, but integrating this into the image wasn't too hard and one of the maintainers of this software happens to own a couple of web-888s.

If any of the preceding ACARS / VDL2 / HFDL protocols are enabled, you can also enable acars2pos which will show the position of some of the airplanes from which data was received on the ADS-B live map of your system. The planes will not have altitude information, they will show up as white outlines, and they will remain in the last position received for more than half an hour.

Next, you can enable AIS / Shipfeeder to track ships and their positions. Shipfeeder comes with its own map, but once you have it enabled there's also an option to show the ships on the ADS-B live map.

Finally, you can enable Radio Sonde. For this protocol it is more typical to not use the nearest airport and your initials but instead your ham radio callsign as identifier (but since no ham radio certification is required to run this service, you can always go back to initials-airport as identifier). Enter the frequency range on which weather balloons broadcast their data in your local area and decide whether you want to have your data shown on the sondehub website.

While in most circumstances you shouldn't need to to access the adsb feeder system directly, if this is something you want to be able to do, here is where you enter the public key of an ssh key-pair which will allow you to log in as root or where you can set the root password of the feeder system to a random value that is displayed in the web interface.

Conversly, if you want to slightly reduce the attack surface of your system (for example if it is installed on someone else's premises), you can remove some obvious attack vectors that would allow someone else to take over your feeder by selecting Secure Feeder System. This is not the same as truly hardening the image; you should assume that someone with access to the hardware will be able to remove the µSD card which will allow them to get access to the system.

There are also options that allow you to shutdown or reboot your system. Please note that there are several scenarios where an SBC will not successfully reboot (or not turn of power on shutdown). Please test this capability before relying on it.

The feeder can be set up to update its base OS and / or the feeder software (i.e. the web UI that controls the system) automatically. You can also trigger the OS or feeder software updates manually from this page.

In situations where one of the underlying containers isn't restarted when needed, you can manually restart or recreate either all or a subset of the running containers.

You can add your feeder system to a ZeroTier or Tailscale global area network in order to be able to access it remotely. Enter the network ID here (you have to set this up at the ZeroTier website, first), or connect to your pre-existing Tailscale network.

You can reconfigure the system's WiFi network if it will be moved to a new location with a different SSID and password.

While some of these options will be useful to most users, some of them are targeting users who are somewhat more familiar with the setup of a Linux system. When in doubt, please ask on one of the forums for guidance and help.

You can backup the settings as well as the history of statistics on the Backup page. Click one of the three Backup buttons and store the zip file on your computer. You can backup just the configuration, include the graphs, or include the full history of data. If needed, you can later go to the Restore page (for example after installing a newer Feeder Image on your system) and restore the data. Once you upload the zip file you will be shown all files and folders that differ from the running system and can choose which ones to restore.