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The Station is our own feeder software: a radio, an MLAT client, and a status page, on a Raspberry Pi. It feeds FlightPortrait and any other network you tick. Feeding is not exclusive; our own stations feed adsb.lol, adsb.fi and airplanes.live too.

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What you need

  • A Raspberry Pi 3B or newer, or a Zero 2 W, with its power supply.
  • A USB receiver for 1090 MHz. One with a built-in filter, like the FlightAware Pro Stick Plus, hears furthest; any RTL-SDR dongle works.
  • A 1090 MHz antenna and a 32 GB high-endurance microSD card.
About US$100, no soldering. Where the antenna goes matters more than anything on the list: as high as you can, by a window or outside, with open sky around it.

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Install

  1. In Raspberry Pi Imager, choose your Pi, then Raspberry Pi OS Lite (64-bit), under Raspberry Pi OS (other). The Station runs on 64-bit only. In the settings, name it station, set a username and password, add your Wi-Fi and turn on SSH. Write the card, put it in the Pi, plug in the receiver and the power.
  2. A few minutes later, from a computer on the same Wi-Fi (Terminal on a Mac, PowerShell on Windows), log in and run the installer:
  3. On your phone, on the same Wi-Fi, open station.local:8654 (or the numeric address the installer printed).
The installer says what it does before each step. The setup page asks three things: name the station, put the antenna on the map, tick the networks to feed. The same page then shows how the station is doing: aircraft now, message rate, today against yesterday, MLAT sync per network. When something is wrong it says what, in one sentence, and what to do about it. The station key is shown once at setup. Keep it: it is the station’s identity and the key to its status page. We store a hash, not the key. The join page watches until the station is heard. Am I feeding checks a station from the network it feeds from, without the key.

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Already running a receiver

The installer notices readsb, dump1090-fa, PiAware, FR24, an adsb.im image or ultrafeeder, and asks before touching anything. Two doors:
  • --replace: the Station takes over the dongle, imports the feeds and keys you had, and asks before stopping anything.
  • --add: nothing is installed; it prints the one line that makes what you run feed FlightPortrait, with a key.
That line, for readsb’s NET_OPTIONS (then restart readsb):
with mlat-client beside it for MLAT:
dump1090-fa only listens and cannot connect out; a small readsb beside it (--net-only, reading its Beast port 30005) carries the same line. and for ULTRAFEEDER_CONFIG, or the adsb.im Expert page:

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What is public

The roster shows a generated id, online status, and a location rounded to about 11 km from coverage. Not an address. Feeder IPs are not stored. Privacy policy. Feeder terms: you keep your data; the aggregate is published under ODbL. Stop whenever you like.

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Source

station (the runtime and the installer), rx (the radio), mlatc (the MLAT client), mlatd (the MLAT server). All AGPL-3.0.