National Flight Centre in Dublin has an interesting functional decor item next to the front desk: two big flat-screen televisions showing the location of the flight school’s fleet (why two? a view of the traffic pattern and then a view of the region). ADS-B is not mandated in Ireland currently so they are doing this with portable GPS trackers that are in a key/notebook bag that students take out to the plane when renting. For a U.S. school in a transponder-required area, however, I think the same thing could be done with software pulling ADS-B data from public sources.
When customers and potential customers come in they can see all of the fun that is happening. For our school it would be planes out on Cape Cod, up in Maine, etc. (Would need to program the software to show the last received position so that the plane does not disappear from the Martha’s Vineyard airport once shut down.)
Readers: What’s the easiest way to build this using ADS-B data? What source?
https://www.adsbexchange.com/how-to-feed/custom-feed-how-to/ looks promising
I think fr24.com has a fleet display in their paid version.
You can just use the adsbexchange.com map and filter aircraft by callsign:
https://global.adsbexchange.com/VirtualRadar/desktop.html
So we are coordinating our group’s arrival at Oshkosh and have approximately 25 planes to this year from all over the country. We have made a digital fleet on http://www.radarbox24.com This may do everything you need. You can just click on “fleet tracking” and type in N numbers. The data comes from ADSB. Maybe I will see you at the show, Phil!
The general idea is that you need an antenna and a receiver at 1090 MHz. Then you need a demodulator that can translate the ADS-B Transponder response waveforms to bits.
You can get a cheap USB-based receiver using a chip originally intended for digital TV reception here:
https://www.rtl-sdr.com/adsb-aircraft-radar-with-rtl-sdr/
Just display the aircraft on http://www.FlightAware.com?
https://flightaware.com/live/flight/N239ND
Wonder how they get the GPS data from the airplanes to the school. LTE isn’t reliable. Satellites are expensive. The range must be longer than 50 miles. Want a 50 mile private network for commuting & transferring data without being tracked.
if they have a mode C transponder you can get a general location via FR24 using MLAT.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multilateration
We’ve been promoting a similar idea to local flight schools and airport managers: http://1200.aero/#/pages/map/live/blueline