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ADS-B plotting with Kali (and other SDR goodies)


Recently I wanted to try some Software Defined Radio stuff.   

I had a RTL-SDR, FM+DAB, DVB-T USB Stick Set with RTL2832U & R820T. that I got from:

But, even though this dongle would break out FM radio stations, and ATC frequencies (like the local Ground Control, tower, and even ATIS), which was cool, it wouldn't break out ADS-B.   

Thus, I bought a Vantech Green Mini RTL2832U R820T DVB-T SDR DAB FM USB DIGITAL TV Tuner Receiver RTL-SDR Project + DAB dongle Tuner MCX Input from Amazon, and tried this.  

This dongle was able to listen to the 1090MHz frequency required for ADS-B (as it goes from 25MHz to 1700MHz).  There were tons of Windows programs out there for breaking out and plotting ADS-B Mode S broadcasts, but not many for Linux.  

For Kali Linux, here's how I got it running and plotting planes around my home:

0) before you start, you should do an apt-get update to ensure you have the most current packages 
1) you'll need USB1.0 support, so run "apt-get install libusb-1.0-0-dev"
2) The rtl_sdr that comes with Kali doesn't work with dump1090. You'll need to build rtl-sdr from source.
To do this, you'll need to follow the instructions at: sdr.osmocom.org/trac/wiki/rtl-sdr.Basically, you'll need to:
    - #apt-get install cmake (you'll need this as part of the install)
    - #git clone git://git.osmocom.org/rtl-sdr.git (this will get the rtl-sdr package... be careful...             whatever directory you type in the command is where it will go)
    - #cd rtl-sdr/
    - #mkdir build
    - #cd build
    - #cmake ../
    - #make
    - #sudo make install
    - #sudo ldconfig
3) get dump1090 from github.com/antirez/dump1090
(Note, if you have a hard time finding it, you can type "wget h-t-t-p-s://github.com/antirez/dump1090/archive/master.zip --no-check-certificate" ....dashes were put in the URL to stop stupid Godaddy formatting)
    - change to the directory and type "make" and that should be it.
    - to run it, you can just type "./dump1090", and it will pipe all the text it sees to the command line.
    - Here's the cool part:  "./dump1090 --net" will start up a web server, and you can connect to it with a browser to localhost:8080 to see the aircraft flying!
Below is a screenshot of what this will look like:


Pretty cool stuff!   

As a note, here is what worked for me with other stuff:

For FM Radio:
#rtl_fm -W -f 89.1M -r 48k -s 200k - | aplay -r 48k -c 1 -f S16_LE

For ATC frequencies (they are actually AM broadcasts, and the -M tells rtl_fm to break it out as AM):
rtl_fm -f 124.2M -M -s 48k | aplay -t raw -r 48k -f S16_LE

Police Scanner (haven't tried this yet, so it may not work):
rtl_fm -N -E -f 154.42M -f 154.75M -f 154.82M -f 154.89M -s 44.1k -o 4 -g 49.2 -l 70 | aplay -r 44.1k -t raw -f S16_LE

Pager Decoder (haven't tried this yet either, so this also may not work):
rtl_fm -N -f 929.77M -s 22.5k -o 4 -g 11.5 -l 250 | multimon -t raw /dev/stdin
(note, I had to apt-get install multimon to get that package)

To get a cool scanner, I used "multimode."  To install this, I did:
  - I went into the multimode/tags/rel0.1/ directory, and ran "make install"
  - I typed "python multimode.py" and the GUI came up... SLICK!
(note, I did get a lot of overruns running this, but I think that was an artifact of me running Kali in a VM, and not on real hardware.  Thus your milage may vary).  

Also for scanning, the rtlsdr-scanner GUI worked like a champ out of the box with Kali.

Lastly, the grx scanner worked GREAT with Kali.   I didn't even have to install it.  I just used the menu (Applications->Kali Linux->Wireless Attacks->SDR->gqrx.  Here's a cool screenshot of that:


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