Non-realtime feeder

Feeding
1

I am a software engineer that recently got my private pilot license in the US. I fly recreationally in small GA planes and often use this site and others that depend on its data for debriefing, so thanks for making this available and thanks to the feeders for capturing the data!

I fly with a Stratus 3 ADS-B receiver.

For those who are unfamiliar, it’s a portable ADS-B receiver that broadcasts that also acts as a WiFi access point and broadcasts the ADS-B traffic data over some kind of unspecified protocol. Another similar commercial product is Sentry and an equivalent open-source DIY project is Stratux.

In the GA world, the purpose of these portable ADS-B receivers is to integrate with “EFB” (electronic flight bag) software like ForeFlight. Basically most GA pilots are flying 50+ years old planes with no GPS or any fancy modern equipments, and so some choose to fly around with an iPad mounted to the steering yoke to get an electronic moving map in front of them for navigation and these ADS-B receivers adds traffic alerts to the EFB application for additional situational awareness.

As an idea for a side project, I was going to investigate if I could capture the data my Stratus in-flight, so I can replay them to ForeFlight later on the ground for debriefing. But I think it would actually be more useful if I can get the data ingested into the official adsbx dataset, so that I can use the interactive map or any other tools that pulls data from the API.

GA pilots often fly into/around deadzones with no existing feeder stations in the network, so I figured that would be beneficial for everyone if we can get that working. Ideally, I am thinking that I would run some kind of program to capture the data either on my phone (preferred – since I won’t have to bring yet another device with me when flying) or on a raspberry pi while in the air, and then once on the ground, upload them to the network in a batch once connected on WiFi.

My questions are:

  1. Would adsbx be interested in these kind of data?
  2. Would adsbx be interested in having these kind of transient feeders in the network?
  3. Is the current infrastructure set up to ingest non-realtime data?
  4. Is there any documentation of the format/protocol for the upload API (feed1.adsbexchange.com/feed2.adsbexchange.com – not talking about the data API)? Happy to look at source code on GitHub as well if I can be pointed to the general direction.
2

Hi there!

So, this question has come up a few times in the past. As of right now, we’re not setup to ingest data via any other method than “live”.

On the backend it creates some technical challenges as to how this data would be integrated “after the fact”.

So, basically it’s something that’s perhaps on the radar, but not in the immediate future.

If we were to do something like this, we’d probably want to ingest timestamped “aircraft.json” files.

3

There would also be issues with validating data, very easy to produce fake data after the fact and sending it in.