Volume 7, Issue 5, May 2017 ISSN: 2277 128X

International Journal of Advanced Research in

Computer Science and Software Engineering
Research Paper
Available online at: www.ijarcsse.com
Live Aircraft Detection with Mode-S Transponder Using
RTL-SDR
Akshay N, Shruthi R, Sushmitha K N, Vanitha R, Dr. Rekha K R
Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Visvesvaraya Technological University,
Karnataka, India
DOI: 10.23956/ijarcsse/SV7I5/0326

Abstract—Air Traffic Control (ATC) is done by air traffic controllers at the ground station which guides the aircraft
on the ground and controlled airspace. ATC is required to prevent collision and organize the air traffic flow. The
technology used for ATC was radar, but now there is a new technology called ADS-B. ADS-B involves airplanes
constantly sending, in real time, flight information and position. It plays a vital role in security and defense. ADS-B is
“automatic” which means it requires no pilot or external input. It is “dependent” which means it depends on the data
from the aircraft’s navigation system. ADS-B basically is an extended version of the Mode-S system which has both
primary and secondary surveillance radars. The flights that are equipped with ADS-B will broadcast their positions
once in every second. The traffic controllers and other ADS-B aircrafts, receives this information which includes the
flights identification, altitude, speed, and projected path of the flight. Encryption is not performed on this information
sent via ADS-B therefore it is available for anybody can receive. Our project mainly deals with the reception of these
signals and detecting the aircrafts location. Later Google maps are used to track the airplane live.

Keywords— Air Traffic Control; Automatic Dependent Surveillance Broadcast; Mode-S; Software Defined Radio;
Aircraft Identification

I. INTRODUCTION
As an alternative to current radio and RADAR based standards for Air t raffic controlling, ADS-B has come out in
recent years. Benefits of ADS-B include better location accuracy because of the use of Global Position System (GPS),
no difficulty in utilizing and keeping ADS-B stations in good condition compared to conventional RADAR stations,
and low investment. Software-Defined-Radio (SDR) is a technology used to replace hardware components by
implementing it on software. This technology finds application in various fields and can be used in Air Traffic Control
(ATC). The key element for handling future air traffic will be Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B).
The interrogating signals are sent by the RADAR at the ground station to the transponders that are present in the aircraft
and use the replies from the aircraft transponders to determine the location of the flights whereas the aircrafts that uses
ADS-B technology will broadcast its position information once in every second. This information can be received by air
traffic controllers and other ADS-B equipped aircrafts. This information includes the aircrafts identification, longitude,
altitude, latitude, speed, and projected route of the flight [1].

II. RELATED WORKS

Air Traffic Control (ATC) is necessary to avoid collisions between aircrafts. ATC is required to organize the aircrafts
and to control flow of air traffic. This paper deals with the design of an Automatic Dependent Surveillance - Broadcast
(ADS-B) based real time air traffic monitoring and tracking system and it uses NI USRP on Software Defined Radio
platform for tracking and monitoring the aircrafts. Communications-Navigations–Surveillance is modernized using a new
technology called ADS-B in Air Traffic Management today, and to revolutionize the aerospace industry, it is a major
component of the communication system of the Internet of Things. Conventional radar system has proven costlier than
ADS-B technology and ADS-B is certified as a viable low cost replacement for conventional radar systems. The paper
describes a low cost solution for real-time air traffic monitoring system based on ADS-B implemented on a software
defined radio platform. An integrated hardware and software solution for rapidly prototyping high-performance wireless
communication systems is provided by Software defined radio [1].
In this paper, the design and implementation of an analog transceiver which operates in Aeronautical Radio
Navigation Services band (960 to 1215 MHz) is done utilizing the benefits provided by Software Defined Radio. All the
equipments that work or functions in ARNS band are combined in order to reduce necessary weight, size, cost and power
of the equipments. The major problems of the design are: receiver should have dynamic range as specified by Minimum
Operational Performance Standards; in order to reduce the weight, size, cost and power requirements, a single High
Power Amplifier is allocated for all the services; and to use an acceptable duplexing method to meet operating goals [4].
In this paper, Air traffic control is done using primary surveillance radar and secondary surveillance radar to know the
location and identify of the aircraft. Aircrafts have equipment called transponder to provide information about the

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 Akshay et al., International Journal of Advanced Research in Computer Science and Software Engineering 7(5),
May- 2017, pp. 490-496
aircrafts to air traffic controller. Airports currently use a secondary-radar system known as the Air Traffic Control Radar
Beacon System (ATCRBS). This achieves compatibility between ATCRBS and Mode-S [2].

III. ADS-B BACKGROUND

Above the primary-radar antenna, the ATCRBS Antenna is mounted. As the antenna rotates, interrogation pulses are
transmitted by Secondary Surveillance Radar at 1030 MHz (continuously in Modes A, C and selectively, in Mode S)
onto the space. This interrogation signal is received by any aircraft within the range and aircraft transponder will send
reply at 1090 MHz which consists of information about the aircraft. The information that is obtained from the aircraft
depends on the interrogation mode. There are different modes of interrogation as specified in the table I which are used
for obtaining different information as reply from the aircraft. The interrogation signal consists of three pulses: P1, P2 and
P3. The modes are differentiated by the spacing between P1 and P3 interrogation pulses [5].

Table I Different Modes

Mode Spacing between P1 and P3 pulses Reply content
A 8s Identity
B 17s Identity
C 21s Altitude
D 25s Undefined
S 3.5s Multipurpose

A. Monopulse technique
Older antennas used to have Sliding-window beam splitter technique to determine the azimuth. In this technique, the
ground station would receive multiple replies from the aircraft and the azimuth would be calculated by taking the average
of the position when it first received the reply to the position when it last received the reply.

Fig. 1 Monopulse Technique, (a) Sum& difference receive pattern, (b) Monopulse characteristics.

Newer antennas are divided into left and right antenna. The signals are combined to obtain sum channel and
difference channel by connecting each side to a hybrid device. Two types of beam patterns is necessary to find aircraft
position (azimuth):
1. Sum beam
2. Difference beam

B. Mode-S
Mode-S is used to prevent over interrogation of the aircraft transponder. Mode-S makes sure that it targets a particular
aircraft whose unique address is known. Therefore only one aircraft which was interrogated will send a reply. But in
Mode-S each aircraft’s unique address must be known. In Mode-S, the interrogation signal is modulated with a carrier of
frequency 1030 MHz using differential phase shift keying (DPSK). Without causing hindrance to mode A and C
interrogations, DPSK permit the interrogation frequency to be more effective in sending information.
The reply that is sent by the aircraft is at 1090 MHz which is Pulse position modulated signal. An aircraft with Mode-
S will not be announced as both a Mode-S and an ATCRBS machine. In mode-S, all the three interrogation pulses will be
of same amplitude as P2 pulse is sent through directional antenna. This clearly avoids aircrafts with ATCRBS
transponders from responding to the interrogation. Mode-S interrogation and Mode-S reply can be short or long. ADS-B
is also Mode-S since it broadcasts all the information about the aircraft. But in ADS-B interrogation is not required since
it is automatic. Mode-S interrogation method is more efficient than Mode-A and Mode-C interrogation. The fig. 2 and fig.
3 shows the Mode-S interrogation and reply waveforms.

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 Akshay et al., International Journal of Advanced Research in Computer Science and Software Engineering 7(5),
May- 2017, pp. 490-496

Fig. 2 Mode-S interrogation waveform

Fig. 3 Mode-S reply waveform

IV. DECODING TECHNIQUE

The data received by the receiver should be decoded so that we can extract the data from the message. This section
deals with a general method to decoding the data. An ADS-B message is 112 bits long and it has 5 parts:
DF(5 bits)-CA (3 bits)-ICAO (24 bits)-DATA (56 bits)-PI(24 bits)

Table II Key Bits of a Message

nBits Bits Abbreviation Name
5 1-5 DF Downlink Format
3 6-8 CA Capability
24 9-32 ICAO ICAO Aircraft
Address
5 33-37 TC Type Code
56 33-88 DATA Data
24 89-112 PI Parity ID

Any ADS-B must start with the Downlink Format 17 (10001 in binary code) for the first 5 bits. Bits 6-8 are used as
additional identifier, which has different meaning within the different types of an ADS-B message [1].

A. ADS-B Message types

To identify what information is contained in an ADS-B message, we need to take a look at the Type Code of the
message, indicated at bits 33 - 37 of the ADS-B message or first 5 bits of the DATA segment. Following are the
relationship between each Type Code and information that is contained in the DATA segment:

Table III Ads-b Message Types

TC Content
1-4 Aircraft Identification
5-8 Surface Position
9-18 Airborne Position(w/Baro Altitude)
19 Airborne Velocities
20-22 Airborne Position(w/GNSS Height)
23-31 Reserved for other uses

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 Akshay et al., International Journal of Advanced Research in Computer Science and Software Engineering 7(5),
May- 2017, pp. 490-496
B. Aircraft Identification and CPR
An aircraft identification message has DF: 17, and TC: 1 to 4, the 56-bit DATA field is configured as follows:
TC (5)-EC (3)-C1 (6)-C2 (6)-C3 (6)-C4 (6)-C5 (6)-C6 (6)-C7 (6)-C8 (6) TC: Type Category
EC: Emitter Category
C: Character
For decode characters, a lookup table is needed for mapping numbers to characters. It is defines as follows, where the # is
not used, and represents a separation.
The position information in ADS-B messages is encoded in a compact position reporting (CPR) format. The general idea
behind CPR is to be able to encode more coordinate decimals using fewer bits. It is achieved by trading global position
ambiguity and time with local position accuracy.

C. Calculating Latitude, Longitude and Altitude

Latitude:
We use the following equation:

First, two constants will be used:

Then we use the following equations to compute the relative latitudes:

For southern hemisphere, values will fall from 270 to 360 degrees, we need to make sure the latitude is within range [-90,
+90]:

Final latitude is chosen depending on the time stamp of the frames:

Longitude:
If the even frame comes latest then T EVEN greater than T ODD:
Even frame:

In case where the odd frame come latest T EVEN lesser than T ODD:
Odd frame:

If the result is larger than 180 degrees:

Altitude:
The altitude of the aircraft is much easier to compute from the data frame. This Q-bit (bit 48) indicates whether the
altitude is encoded in multiples of 25 or 100 ft (0: 100 ft, 1:25 ft).The final altitude value will be:

Finally, we have all three components (latitude/longitude/altitude) of the aircraft position.

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 Akshay et al., International Journal of Advanced Research in Computer Science and Software Engineering 7(5),
May- 2017, pp. 490-496
V. METHODOLOGY

Fig. 4 ADS-B Receiver

ADS-B signals are generated using PPM modulation and transmitted with a carrier of frequency of 1090 MHz This
signal is the one which is received by the receiver and is to be decoded [12, 13]. Preamble detector will make the receiver
to identify and synchronize with a message received for decoding and it is also used for message alignment. The data is
always in serial format. The serial to parallel convertor converts the signal to a parallel form. And this is then
demodulated. After demodulation of the packet, CRC block checks for error detection to determine whether the received
packet is valid i.e. it has the right aircraft ID. After the preamble has been detected, for message decoding the individual
bits need to be identified. To ensure proper decoding, the data formats must be known to ensure whether correct bits are
used for altitude, aircraft ID etc.

A. Installing the drivers

For any device to be connected to a PC needs a driver so that the PC can recognise the device. So the device we use is
RTL2832U (RTL-SDR) and the required Driver for this device should be used [9]. The following steps were used to
install the drivers:
1. Update your distribution: sudo apt-get update
2. Install the tools needed to retrieve (git), compile(cmake) and build (build-essential):
sudo apt-get install git, sudo apt-get install c make, sudo apt-get install build-essential.
3. Install libsub-1.0-0-dev which is a C library that provides generic access to USB devices:
sudo apt-get install libusb-1.0-0-dev
4. Retrieve,build and compile the RTL2832U Osmocom drivers from the: source.gitclonegit://git.osmocom.org/rtl-
sdr.git,
cd rtl-sdr/, mkdir build, cd build, cmake ../- DINSTALL_UDEV_RULES=ON, make, sudo make install, sudo
ldconfig.

B. Blacklisting
Blacklist the default driver that is automatically loaded for using the dongle as a TV device as it doesn’t work for SDR
purposes and clashes with the new Osmocom drivers we just installed.
1. Open your /etc/modprobe.d folder as an administrator.
2. Create a new file ’blacklist-rtl.conf’ and add this one line: blacklist dvb usb rtl28xxu
3. Save the file, close the editor and restart the computer.
gksu gedit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-rtl.conf blacklist dvb usb rtl28xxu

C. Testing
Test that the dongle is working by opening a terminal and typing: rtl test -t

Fig. 5 RTL-SDR Test

One more method of testing was by receiving FM signals. A particular FM channel (92.7) was received and the output
was audible.
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 Akshay et al., International Journal of Advanced Research in Computer Science and Software Engineering 7(5),
May- 2017, pp. 490-496

Fig. 6 FM Reception

VI. RESULTS

Fig. 7 Terminal Output 1

This is the live tracking output in local host: 8080

Fig. 8 Tracking Output

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 Akshay et al., International Journal of Advanced Research in Computer Science and Software Engineering 7(5),
May- 2017, pp. 490-496
VII. CONCLUSION
Automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B) has promised new levels of safety and operational efficiency to
aviation. Having the right full permission and license, even the transmission can be displayed as a project. In which a
transmitter circuit can be built and a uplink signal can be trans-mitted and with the receiver circuit, the data can be
decoded and tracked. ADS-B is the “future” of ATC. It has overcome all the problems and limitations of ATCRBS. This
technique can be used or implemented in ships and trains to track them for better control of the flow of operation.

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