Capturing ADS-B packets using HackRF

A few weeks ago, I managed to setup my computer to capture ADS-B beacons transmitted from aircrafts flying over UCD. That was a fantastic experience. Unfortunately, I was woking on trying another tool while working on this and therefore, I cannot remember the exact tools I installed for this particular work. Therefore, I will write the steps I remember which may include some steps which are not required for this work. I did this work on a Kali Linux machine.

(1) Install some required packages using the apt-get command as follows.

sudo apt-get install gqrx gr-air-modes cmake g++ libpython-dev python-numpy swig hackrf libhackrf-dev

(2) Install the tool called SoapySDR which is available on the Github.

git clone https://github.com/pothosware/SoapySDR.git
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make -j4
sudo make install
sudo ldconfig #needed on debian systems
SoapySDRUtil --info

(3) Install the tool called SoapyHackRF which is again available on Github.

git clone https://github.com/pothosware/SoapyHackRF.git
cd SoapyHackRF
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make
sudo make install
SoapySDRUtil --probe="driver=hackrf"

(4) As a part of the two tools installed on the previous steps, we need some extra stuff which we can get using apt-get command.

sudo apt-get install soapysdr-module-uhd libuhd003.010.002 libuhd-dev

(5) Now, we need to add some UDEV rules which is explained in the following link.

https://github.com/mossmann/hackrf/wiki/FAQ

(6) We are good to go now. Let's connet the HackRF to the computer and run the following command to start the ADS-B receiver.

modes_rx -s osmocom -r 10e6

It takes some time to pick some signals from an aircraft which is not very frequent around our building. Whenever an ADS-B transmission is picked from by our setup, it will be displayed on the terminal.

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