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Collecting Private Flight Data On the World Economic Forum Attendees With RTL-SDR (qz.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Every year politicians and business men meet at the World Economic Forum in the small mountain town of Davos, Switzerland to discuss various topics and create business deals. This year Quartz, an online newspaper/magazine sent a journalist to the forum tasked with writing a unconventional story about the forum: he was asked to monitor the private helicopter traffic coming in and out of Davos from transponder broadcast of ADS-B data. Using an $20 RTL-SDR dongle, Raspberry Pi and ADS-B collinear antenna they monitored the flights over Davos. From the data they were able to determine the flight paths that many helicopters took, the types of helicopters used and the most popular flight times.
This is what Flightradar24 uses. A little more expensive box, but no big deal.
And any executive person should be aware of this and not attend major events like the World Economic Forum in their private aircraft but instead travel incognito. Use Business Class and make sure that the clothing is not standing out. If you have a security team - make them look like a mix of tourists, business men and airport service personnel. (Who actually cares about the person pushing the airport wheelchair around?)
As soon as you have a helicopter you are standing out as a VIP like a polar bear in a kindergarten.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Normally I'm the first to complain about this but everything was explained in the links.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
I can seen the airport of my nation's capital from my balcony. I have a similar setup logging the position reports to a PostGIS DB, which allows some interesting queries ("Give me all the position reports found beneath a certain altitude within a certain polygon that describes a runway, sorted by airframe and timestamp") which allows you to determine what planes landed and took off.
Looking up who owns the aircraft can be done online, and it's funny when something owned by a holding company in the Caymans flies in. Now if only there was an online API that allowed one to query the visitors list for the legislative bodies, one could tie the data together, along with the record of votes cast, and jump to some intriguing conclusions.
Top Tips:
Become invisible to police officers by sticking your hands in your pockets and looking up at the sky while whistling.
GZ0275 HMP Broadmoor.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Or you could just shoot one down. The answer will be on CNN within half an hour or so.
BRB, door.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Except that only the ATC system really 'needs' this information, you and I do not (granted it is still fun to use/see)
As a pilot, I certainly do need to see that information. ADSB data is an extension of the "see and avoid" concept, where the pilot has a responsibility for situational awareness and is the ultimate controller of his aircraft.
It's nice when ATC issues traffic advisories, but is required to do so only for IFR traffic. VFR traffic can ask for "flight following", but that service is "workload permitting" for the controller, and VFR traffic without flight following get NO traffic advisories except the ADSB data (or TAS in some airspaces.)
Given the decade+ rollout that the US based system is to take, it's pretty unlikely that midway through they will turn around and say "on second thought, you need to upgrade to this even newer standard in order to be compliant"
The general aviation fleet and suppliers are so far behind the curve on meeting the 2020 deadline that it would be impossible for FAA to suddenly change the technical specifications for ADSB. There are so many aircraft owners and operators who are waiting for the suppliers to come up with reasonable solutions (especially for ADSB-out) that it may wind up being impossible to meet the existing deadline with existing standards anyway. Just the number of aircraft that will require avionics work will mean that the backlog will extend past the deadline.