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Jetnet Acquires ADS-B Exchange, a community-fed ADSB aggregator

285 points by cobertos 4y ago

RankingMember 4y ago
Replacement site from the people behind the original (except for the sellout) already up: https://globe.adsb.fi/tar1090/ https://globe.adsb.fi/tar1090/
windex 4y ago
Billionaires are going dark and buying out all the flashlights.
dmd 4y ago
Did their acquisition price factor in the % of people who will stop feeding because of this? It's one thing to feed a free open source project it's another to give free labor to Silversmith Capital.
- Kalibr 4y ago
  Probably to eliminate the open source competition if anything.
  - notahacker 4y ago
    afaik JetNet hasn't offered a competing service before: their focus is on business jet fleet and transaction related data (I worked for what could loosely be described as a competitor) The data has some value in supporting that core product (as an additional data feed to sell a handful of enterprise clients, to support their fleet data research and possibly to enhance their FBO/charter products). I guess part of the appeal of ADS-B Exchange is that working in business aviation, an unfiltered dataset is a lot more useful to them than a filtered one like most of the commercial providers. Still seems like a slightly odd acquisition, since they could have got the data beforehand relatively inexpensively and they'd probably get better feed coverage leaving it as an OS project and I do wonder how they'll manage privacy requests from some of their clients...
    - error503 4y ago
      Perhaps enabling them to censor the feed is one of the primary reasons for the acquisition. I can't imagine it was that expensive, considering the likes of whom might take issue with the data being public.
      - brookst 4y ago
        Perhaps, but it would be like buying a newsstand to censor a newspaper. The data is still freely available and will be distributed via another channel.
        mikewarot 4y ago
        But will it really become available again? Or, more likely, like RSS, will this snuff it out. It's amazing how someone with a bit of capital and time can control almost anything that offends them.
        inferiorhuman 4y ago
        That sort of irrational behavior makes me wonder if das muskrat has his paws in this. If he was willing to drop $44 billion on Twitter, this is pocket change by comparison. And he's been desperately trying to get that guy to stop tracking his jet. The data is still freely available and will be distributed via another channel. The ADS-B transmissions are still freely available but the value is in the aggregate product. In the case of ADS-B Exchange that aggregate takes a ton of work from volunteers who (if the comments here are any indication) are inclined to stop volunteering. An ADS-B receiver has a range of dozens, maybe hundreds of miles. Without that network of volunteers Joe Schmo in Santa Cruz will have no way of tuning in to that freely observable transponder in Austin.
        nocoiner 4y ago
        There’s most definitely a coordination problem to be solve to recreate that network, and I don’t mean to understate the difficulty of that at all, but I’m wondering if a (reconstituted) network of a small-ish number of volunteers could scale up to, say, 80% of the current ADSB Exchange coverage surprisingly quickly? My feeder, which cost maybe $100 all-in (pi + sdr + antenna; though the pi was much cheaper then than it is now) has full coverage of two major airports. Normal range is 200 miles (obviously dependent on altitude) and sometimes picks up plans ~250 miles away, I assume depending on relatively rare atmospheric conditions. With reasonably optimal distribution of what, a few hundred receivers, my mental math is suggesting you could cover a majority of the continental U.S. landmass and a large majority of its population and air traffic? Again, not to understand the magnitude of this. But if someone’s objective is generally to redistribute public data, or track Gulfstreams on their way to Omaha during times of financial upheaval, or poke a finger in the eye of the private jet lobby, but not to create a 99% comprehensive, monetizable data source for a sale to private equity - maybe it’s not crazy infeasible?
- mindcrime 4y ago
  I mean, if I were providing one of these feeds, I'd probably shut it down and look for (or create) a new community-driven alternative.
  - capableweb 4y ago
    I chose to contribute my collected ADS-B data to ADS-B Exchange rather than Flightradar24 just because ADS-B Exchange was community driven and not owned by a company. I just turned off my sharing and looking for alternatives. If anyone know of any, please share them :)
    - nerpderp82 4y ago
      [flagged]
      - Operyl 4y ago
        Man, the blockchain being inserted wherever it doesn't need to be is becoming rampant on HN, isn't it? Humor me, though, how would that work and why would the cost of running a "blockchain," both in terms of money and energy wasted, be better than a simple feed aggregator?
        nerpderp82 4y ago
        A signed append only log, distributed with webtorrent would provide provenance and distribution. This would allow for not having to have dedicated infrastructure for collection. One could also use USENET and get rid of the garbage will killfiles.
        Operyl 4y ago
        And who maintains the signing keys? It's just as centralized, with tons more complexity.. EDIT: Regardless, the point I'm making is this is just way more work for something that really doesn't need a blockchain.
- wpietri 4y ago
  I might feel similarly, especially given my distaste for private equity. But in the AIS (ship tracking) space, commercial versions seem to do ok. MarineTraffic runs its own blatantly commercial effort. And AIShub.net is not commercial itself, but it is run by Astra Paging, which definitely is. I run a receiver that feeds into both networks, and in both cases I look at it as a value-for-value exchange.
- dgacmu 4y ago
  Some are likely to, but remember that feeding is a mutual exchange - sites that you feed to generally give you a free, no ads account. I feed both ADS-B exchange and flightaware for this reason. Although I will admit that the flight aware app is more useful unless you're interested in unfiltered data. Contributing to an unfiltered source is one motivation, but it's one of several.
  - jvanvleet 4y ago
    This is my situation as well. If you travel a lot, having something light Flightaware giving you more detailed information about what is really happening with your flight or airport is wonderful and starting a feed was a fun way to get more features.
    - sokoloff 4y ago
      I have a basic (free) Flightaware account. I can't imagine anything relevant to commercial airliner travel that I'd need that I don't get from that free account. Is there something I'm missing? (I totally get the fun aspect and it's fairly cheap to put a receiver up.)
      - dgacmu 4y ago
        the only value for me is having no ads. which is, in fact, something i value, but not at the $80/month it would take to subscribe for. But it's worth sending my feed.
      - james_pm 4y ago
        From FR24, you get two years of historical data for starters.
      - Scoundreller 4y ago
        Lots of interesting stuff outside of commercial airliners. Flightaware (and FR24) censors (for a fee). I remember emailing a journo covering a protest to look up and observe the plane circling around. But ultimately they’re different services: Adsb is vessel focussed, while FA/FR24 are flight# focussed. Want to find out what routes your aircraft typically flies? Adsb will be the place to check. Want to see if your flight is typically on-time? FA/FR24.
- sschueller 4y ago
  Well I for one will stop feeding them.
robbiet480 4y ago
Already seeing a lot of people in ADS-B Discords saying they are cutting off their feeds because they feel sold out.
- myself248 4y ago
  Is the codebase open / is anyone spinning up an alternative yet?
  - notahacker 4y ago
    Not sure how it matches feature for feature, but https://opensky-network.org https://opensky-network.org has been crowdsourcing unfiltered ADSB data for longer, provides tools to view the data and supplies full API access to the raw data to academics and non-profits at no charge. There's room for another provider, and at the same time lots of enthusiasts with the boxes will carry on sending it, like they do to other closed source, profit-making ventures like FlightAware and Flightradar24...
    - myself248 4y ago
      Alright, so OpenSky and ADSB Hub are the two I've learned about so far in this thread. Very cool.
      - mike_d 4y ago
        Airframes.io is where everyone is moving to.
        H8crilA 4y ago
        Note that at the moment aiframes is for a completely different type of aviation-produced data (messages: acars, hfdl, vdl, ...). I am assuming that airframes.io will create an ADS-B feed too, now that the best open system (adsbexchange) is gone.
        rektide 4y ago
lsllc 4y ago
I wonder if this was done to stop trackers like @ElonJet since ADS-B Exchange doesn't seem to support the "privacy" requests of the rich & famous as FlightAware / FlightRadar24 et al do. https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-private-jet-no-longer-appearing-on-public-tracking-2022-12 https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-private-jet-no-lon...
- cobertos 4y ago
  Interestingly, ADS-B Exchange's twitter is suspended when I looked to see if there was any news updates there
  - wkat4242 4y ago
    That's because they pissed off Elon by supplying the source data for ElonJet. He's been on a banning spree for weeks. Anyone who so much as mentioned the account would get the banhammer.
    - cactusplant7374 4y ago
      You can still post the link with TinyURL or another URL shortener.
- sftomato 4y ago
  Let's not forget that thanks to adsb-exchange, authorities were also able to track Jeffrey Epstein's private jets. https://www.insider.com/jeffrey-epsteins-private-jet-flight-data-2019-7 https://www.insider.com/jeffrey-epsteins-private-jet-flight-... https://github.com/adsbxchange/Jeffrey_Epstein_Lolita_Express https://github.com/adsbxchange/Jeffrey_Epstein_Lolita_Expres...
  - mlindner 4y ago
    All of this information is public and known to the government. ADBS Exchange didn't provide anything that wasn't already available.
arprocter 4y ago
>maintaining our enthusiast roots and unfiltered data Interesting to see if a certain someone's jet(s) remain trackable
dgacmu 4y ago
I cynically wonder how much they'll start charging billionaires to hide their private jet info.
- jgalt212 4y ago
  or at the very least, the partners at Silversmith will have a long list of billionaires who owe them favors.
- sschueller 4y ago
  Cynic in me thinks the was arranged by billionaires that don't want to be tracked. Chump change for them.
myself248 4y ago
Well, fuck. Companies eat things to kill them because it works. Only some fraction of users will jump to the alternative, and indeed the alternative never ends up as strong as the original. Are there examples of where the alternative turned out stronger?
- ninjagoo 4y ago
  LibreOffice is a good example.
  - account42 4y ago
    As far as mindshare goes, I'm not so sure. Plenty of people that still only know "Open Office" even if some of them are actually using LibreOffice.
jmyeet 4y ago
Years ago compact disc metadata was really important. There was an open library for this called CDDB. At some point the owners of that started silently inserting an agreement by the user to assign ownership of the submissions to the company. That “open” database got sold off and became Gracenote [1]. I’m not sure how many times we need to learn this lesson. [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gracenote https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gracenote
- wpietri 4y ago
  Not to be cynical, but I doubt the lesson will ever get learned. These things start with big ideas, hope, and an ignorance of the practical details. Over time, practical realities, like paying for goods and services, crop up. In a capitalist society, most of the ready-made solutions to that look like businesses. And our current culture of capitalism then shifts toward short-term revenue-maximization, putting things in the hands of predators and sociopaths. I know people have made attempts to solve this, like B Corps and groups like the Apache Foundation. But I don't think we're there yet. One could try to create a foundation that specifically incubates projects that go beyond open source to open/collective services. But even if one solves funding for that, there's still the problem of finding the naive starters of things and crushing their dreams just enough to get them on a better course, but not so much that they quit.
  - tialaramex 4y ago
    Because profit motive is the usual problem, you can deliberately design that out if you're careful. England (where I live) had a lot of Building Societies - mutual institutions where some members are saving money, and those savings are lent to other members (borrowers) to buy homes to live in, the interest from which of course makes this a good deal for the savers done at scale (so as to smooth out inevitable losses when some borrowers default). This can be a very lucrative line of business during a housing boom, and many of these societies found themselves with a considerable cash positive position in the 1980s. Since the members own the society, they can just change the rules of the society and "demutualize", extracting the cash for themselves. Of course this destroys the society, an important institution which has helped so many people to own somewhere to live - but hey, you've got some money and isn't that what's really important? My parents voted "Yes" to demutualize the society where they'd saved money and from which they had borrowed to buy the house I grew up in, I (as an idealistic teenager who had my own modest savings) voted "No", the "Yes" votes won and the resulting entity, now a bank, eventually was mired in scandal and no longer serves the purpose the proud building society had served before. But hey, they got their money. People like them were nicknamed "Carpetbaggers" in the UK as a result, by analogy to the US concept. Now, I mention this because as several larger societies were demutualised this way, the remainder realised that the same fate could be theirs, and many swallowed a "poison pill" to prevent it. They changed their rules so that all future members (savers, borrowers, whichever) signed away rights to the proceeds of any demutualisation (e.g. giving it to a charity). So you could vote to tear the society to pieces, but you would no longer make a penny from doing so, and suddenly that's not very attractive. It worked.
vlovich123 4y ago
Out of curiosity, how does this community effort do quality control (ie preventing someone rich from paying some people to flood the system with conflicting information)
- dgacmu 4y ago
  There's a protocol for multilateration of the detected jets using all of the receivers that are in range of its signal. Whil I'm sure there are ways you could attack it, it's pretty robust to the more obvious things.
  - wkat4242 4y ago
    The mlat is more for receiving aircraft that use traditional transponders which don't include gps coordinates but just a squawk code and altitude. Hence it needs multiple receivers to triangulate their location. I don't think it uses this for real adsb feeds.
  - vlovich123 4y ago
    Would switching to a federated / distributed protocol fix things? Or is there some additional critical role that ADS-B was providing?
- Cesartheiceman 4y ago
  We have a community in RadarBox and that we have direct contact with the developers: RadarBox.com/addcoverage
toomuchtodo 4y ago
Anyone want to work together on spinning up a non profit replacement with governance that prohibits a transfer of ownership to a for profit entity?
- wpietri 4y ago
  I run an AIS receiver and have previously run a technical co-op. I am happy to chat, although I don't have time to do much direct labor right now. But the first questions I'd want to answer: 1) What will participants get out of it? 2) How will you pay for the central services used? 3) Where there isn't enough volunteer labor, how will you pay for needed labor? I don't want to discourage anybody, but there are some hard sustainability problems there.
  - andiareso 4y ago
    I'm interested in helping as well (software engineer). This is such a loss for the community. Like other's have stated, ADS-B exchange didn't have to follow the privacy requests as they didn't aggregate FAA data so it remained open. I'm wondering what the future will hold with the new ownership.
  - notahacker 4y ago
    Depending on what sort of commercial arrangements participants were happy with, the obvious fundraising options are selling value added services or derived data on top or classic FOSS 'sponsorship' with corporate partners (hard to get for a new project in this space). That doesn't guarantee sustainability of course, particularly with there being a lot of competition in this sector with good coverage already. (FWIW I'm happy to chat: have sold non-ADSB aviation data and consulting before and been involved with buying ADSB and AIS from a commercial provider)
    - wpietri 4y ago
      Having been both on the buy and sell side is a very valuable perspective to include. Do you have a sense of where some good dividing lines are between what to give to the general public, what contributors get, and what is marketable? As an example, AISHub data contributors get a free real-time stream of global data in the same format that comes out of an AIS receiver. They also get limited API access: https://www.aishub.net/api https://www.aishub.net/api On top of that, the company that runs AISHub sells both software and data services: http://www.astrapaging.com/data-services http://www.astrapaging.com/data-services
yardie 4y ago
One of the first projects I created with the Raspberry Pi Model A was setup a SDR listening station. Then I wrote some software and downloaded software to listen and stream ADS-B data to a few aggregators. One of them was ADS-B Exchange. The other was ADS-B Hub[0]. The later is still free and still open source. [0] https://www.adsbhub.org/ https://www.adsbhub.org/
- H8crilA 4y ago
  Thanks, I'm switching my feeds from the shitty people behind ADSBExchange.
  - commandersaki 4y ago
    Just to be clear it’s the owner/founder that’s being shitty. The people behind running the infrastructure are against the acquisition. It’s also unclear whether they’re getting paid (enough) to transition the servers to the new company.
- Cesartheiceman 4y ago
  Yardie, I am a feeder and share data with RadarBox. For me, it is the best flight tracking website and I also get 10% off on hardware products.
huslage 4y ago
Does anyone want to fund an open ADSB data gathering platform for a nonprofit to run?
- gggggg5 4y ago
  GDPR compliance is a big problem in this space, there's no GDPR exception which would allow you to legally collect this data in the EU. (Unless you limited your collection to whitelisted A/C) Right now every single player in this space is operating illegally, but it'll probably take years before data protection authorities will start to crack down.
  - looping__lui 4y ago
    Yes, and FR24 is investigated in the EU: https://se.linkedin.com/pulse/en-digitalsektor-ger-imy-m%C3%A5nga-klagom%C3%A5l-fr%C3%A5n-andra-eu-l%C3%A4nder-borre https://se.linkedin.com/pulse/en-digitalsektor-ger-imy-m%C3%...
  - sigmar 4y ago
    Is SDR accessible through the internet a violation of GDPR? Hard for me to understand why relaying ADS-B would be different (considering the sdr data is inclusive of the ADS-B data)
    - tialaramex 4y ago
      I'm going to guess that collecting / organising the data is a problem. Data Protection laws, and I believe the GDPR is the same, aren't interested in just stuff you've got, for example if you write a blog, and you mention that you saw Jim at the weekend and his sister is apparently pregnant, these laws do not consider that you've got a database there with a single row ("Jim's sister" "Pregnant") which needs to be treated as PII and have Subject access requirements etc. You're not really collecting pregnancy status data about women, you just have a blog post. Whereas if I build a scraper, and I search thousands of blogs and correlate stuff to build a Postgres DB with "Jim's sister" "Pregnant" as one of dozens of rows, that is the sort of thing these laws care about. So I can imagine that likewise "Here are radio signals I am receiving" looks like public information, no big deal, whereas "Here is a database of records I gathered by studying the past 24 hours of radio signals" is different.
femboy 4y ago
The Discord link on ADSBExchange points to a server called "Airframes.io Enthusiasts" - going to the website shows: > Airframes is an aircraft-related aggregation service that receives ACARS, VDL, HFDL, and SATCOM data from volunteers around the world. > It is under very active development and you will notice changes from day to day. Also, issues are expected. > Contributing your feed allows us to make ground developing new decoders and make important statistical observations. It also benefits users of the service so that they can see more about flights as they traverse covered territories. Perhaps the original founders' work will continue here? EDIT: It does not seem like the original founders has collaborated with the community on this, and the people there are just as lost as anyone else.
- cobertos 4y ago
  The discord was originally the ADSBExchange discord, but, I believe a mod has taken control, banned the person who owned/sold ADSBExchange (Dan Streufert) and made a bunch of announcements. The mod used to have Outlook email access on the original domain, so it seems like there's kind of a shakeup going on as well It's kind of chaos currently. I only joined this Discord in December and it was very different then. It seemed to be pretty community oriented, with images for RaspPi and scripts to help setup feeding and the developers of these tools were in there chatting. Not company employed people to my knowledge.
oldstrangers 4y ago
Well that sucks. I had just gotten into using ADS-B over Flightradar24.
- Havoc 4y ago
  That shouldn't be affected by the matter at hand. ADS-B is the coms standard, ADS-B Exchange is a specific aggregation effort.
  - oldstrangers 4y ago
    Well that sucks. I had just gotten into using ADS-B Exchange over Flightradar24.
jmacd 4y ago
Just unplugged my receiver.
prova_modena 4y ago
Well, dang. I have been maintaining a Twitter bot that uses the ADS-B Exchange API, but paused development after Musk started going after ElonJet aggressively and Twitter began to ban aircraft tracking accounts. I just restarted work this week to implement Mastodon support, but looks like I need to pause again to reassess what ADS-B data source(s) to support. I would really like to know the story behind this acquisition as my previous interactions with the ADS-B Exchange owner (edit: after checking back in on the discord maybe this person was not the owner, but one of the main team members) on discord were positive and they seemed like a very passionate and principled person. This was like more than 1 year ago now, though. My suspicion is that the loud, polarized public discourse around the ElonJet controversy, which led to ADS-B Exchange getting banned from Twitter, may have caused them to reassess their priorities. I hope they are not under any kind of legal threat from Musk.
nocoiner 4y ago
Welps, shutting off my feed today. I was actually thinking about this exact scenario just last week. Funny to hear that it happened.
- wkat4242 4y ago
  Funny but also sad :(
nocoiner 4y ago
I don’t mind feeding FlightAware and Flightradar24 - they’re for-profit companies, and are clear about the terms of exchange something of (dubious) value for the data they receive. This feels a lot more skeezy. Oh well, fool me once, and all that. I do look forward to shutting down my feed once I’m back in front of a computer. Something something, why we can’t have nice things.
- james_pm 4y ago
  Same. I get value back from FR24 in the form of a Business subscription which gives me a TON of data and access I wouldn't be able to afford. I fed ADS-B Exchange for nothing because it seemed like a nice thing to do to benefit the wider tracking community. To have the founder cash out and sell OUR data without even talking to the community first? That really rubbed me the wrong way. I stopped feeding about an hour ago.
  - Havoc 4y ago
    Also doing same re FR24 and biz sub. Curious what data you use from it though? I haven't had much use for it frankly
    - james_pm 4y ago
      I'm interested in a lot of different forms of transportation as a hobby. Photography, tracking, etc. Being able to see the flight history of a specific airframe is interesting to me or going back and looking at past flights. Fleets is another feature I use. For example, I've been interested in trying to get photos of the new E915-E2 jets that Porter Airlines is adding so I've created a "fleet" and can easily track the whereabouts in the hopes of being able to catch one in flight to photograph.
      - Havoc 4y ago
        Got it. Thanks
- metadaemon 4y ago
phkahler 4y ago
750,000 messages per second! Imagine if each node knew where it was and all of its nearest neighbors. The receivers could filter and not send messages that are coming from planes closer to their neighbors! Distributed filtering of redundant messages FTW!
- sorenjan 4y ago
  You need messages from multiple receivers for MLAT, I think they use messages with known plane positions to calibrate the MLAT solver since the receivers doesn't have a high quality common time source. Plus proximity doesn't mean you can see airplanes that are behind buildings, at low altitude, etc.
  - phkahler 4y ago
    What is MLAT in this case? The planes transmit their location in the ADS-B message. They are filtering a lot of redundant message receptions from multiple receivers. I would assume the messages also include altitude and heading information, so locations can be predicted between message receptions.
    - sorenjan 4y ago
      MLAT is multilateration, where they use the difference in time of arrival to multiple receivers with known locations to estimate the positions of planes that doesn't transmit their location using ADS-B but only use older Mode S. This is mostly small or military planes. https://flightaware.com/adsb/mlat/ https://flightaware.com/adsb/mlat/
- KirillPanov 4y ago
  > 750,000 messages per second! ZOMG, that's like... a 1990s DSL connection!
  - mkl 4y ago
    Only if your messages are 1 byte long or something.
rhacker 4y ago
This isn't going to go over well. I hope everyone shuts down their feed.
- nerpderp82 4y ago
  Most likely the goal.
  - wkat4242 4y ago
    I don't know, now that they own it they can just start censoring it like the others. And I'm sure at least one alternative will pop up
donaldcjackson 4y ago
I suggest that folks that want to feed open ADSB aggregators consider feeding https://opensky-network.org https://opensky-network.org
- everybodyknows 4y ago
  Interesting possibilities here: > You can now feed VHF/voice data to OpenSky and help researchers around the world. Check out the interface and set up a feeder at https://ui.atc.opensky-network.org/ https://ui.atc.opensky-network.org/
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
squarefoot 4y ago
Time to move the ADSB sharing network over p2p? Assuming it's doable, that way whoever buys an aggregator site would own just the interface, not the data sharing network.
wkat4242 4y ago
Oh nooo.. Now there's no volunteer driven tracking network left. And they'll probably start blocking military and private flights just like the other commercial trackers. Too bad, it was great while it lasted. Hopefully someone starts up a new one that will stay independent.
tecleandor 4y ago
The dullest non-announce ever: https://twitter.com/ADSBex/status/1618306706861338625 https://twitter.com/ADSBex/status/1618306706861338625 Hasn't said anything in the forum or the site news section, and hasn't posted that tweet until after the official announce by Jetnet. Looks like a case of "take the money and run". Doesn't smell good for the ads-b community.
plantain 4y ago
Good. ADS-B Exchange's API is horribly broken and they never even replied to my support/refund requests so I had to chargeback. A shakeup might help.
- Cesartheiceman 4y ago
  I am a RadarBox feeder and can use the API. I use it for some of my applications.
reallymental 4y ago
Is there any service like this for AIS data?
- Cesartheiceman 4y ago
  Yes, ShipXplorer.
evil-olive 4y ago
if this news has gotten anyone interested in running an ADSB antenna/feeder, the SDR Enthusiasts book [0] is an excellent resource. their github [1] has a bunch of very nice, modular Docker images that make it easy to feed one or more ADSB aggregators. (by comparison, a lot of the other software ecosystem around amateur SDR / ADSB relies on `curl | sudo bash` type install scripts) 0: https://sdr-enthusiasts.gitbook.io/ads-b/ https://sdr-enthusiasts.gitbook.io/ads-b/ 1: https://github.com/sdr-enthusiasts https://github.com/sdr-enthusiasts
- Havoc 4y ago
  Thanks. Will try to tweak my setup to feed all of them. Don’t really see the point in being stingy with this info
- RNAlfons 4y ago
  It actually really did get me interested in the topic. I have a raspi which doesn't do much left. I guess I'll add it to the network soon. Thank you :)
Awelton 4y ago
Looks like I am going to stop feeding then. Donating electricity and bandwidth to an open source project and donating to a massive corporation just aren't the same thing. Pay me and I will turn it back on, but until then I guess it is going to sit idle.
esjr 4y ago
I run this site : https://ducis.net/ https://ducis.net/ It is a hobby that got out of hand. The idea was/is to see what this data reveals. What can be learned just by observing 'traffic'. The answer is : a lot and I know various agencies and governments freaked out when they realized how visible some things are. Basically, with enough 'training' and domain-knowledge it's all pretty much out there : military transports, private military contractors, refugee flights, mercenaries, embargo busters, the spooks etc. Obviously there was a reaction. Over the years they've tried to tidy things up with some success by putting pressure on the tracker-sites (or simply attacking the small players' servers). Anyway, the point is : it is complex and fascinating. I'm not interested in shouting "SECRET flight..." for clicks but if someone wants to try and set up a new 'ADS-B Exchange' : basically free, responsible, open source etc and wants to take on board a couple of years of deep domain-knowledge and decades of coding skills, contact details are on the site. I know this is like a shameless (well) plug but...it's complicated ;)
yooo000 4y ago
The dude who owned it was kind of a douche to start with, as I recall. That being said, I think I'd be hard-pressed not to sell something I started as a hobby that grew and grew. Speaking of which, I created my own site[1] within the past couple of years...have a few friends feeding data. I set them up with Pi's, antennas, cords and the proper software. Would be super stoked if anyone else wanted to feed me! [1]https://radar.airport-frequencies.com https://radar.airport-frequencies.com Hit me up if you want to join!

285 points by cobertos 4y ago

Replacement site from the people behind the original (except for the sellout) already up: https://globe.adsb.fi/tar1090/ https://globe.adsb.fi/tar1090/

windex 4y ago

Billionaires are going dark and buying out all the flashlights.

dmd 4y ago

Did their acquisition price factor in the % of people who will stop feeding because of this? It's one thing to feed a free open source project it's another to give free labor to Silversmith Capital.

Kalibr 4y ago
Probably to eliminate the open source competition if anything.
- notahacker 4y ago
  afaik JetNet hasn't offered a competing service before: their focus is on business jet fleet and transaction related data (I worked for what could loosely be described as a competitor) The data has some value in supporting that core product (as an additional data feed to sell a handful of enterprise clients, to support their fleet data research and possibly to enhance their FBO/charter products). I guess part of the appeal of ADS-B Exchange is that working in business aviation, an unfiltered dataset is a lot more useful to them than a filtered one like most of the commercial providers. Still seems like a slightly odd acquisition, since they could have got the data beforehand relatively inexpensively and they'd probably get better feed coverage leaving it as an OS project and I do wonder how they'll manage privacy requests from some of their clients...
  - error503 4y ago
    Perhaps enabling them to censor the feed is one of the primary reasons for the acquisition. I can't imagine it was that expensive, considering the likes of whom might take issue with the data being public.
    - brookst 4y ago
      Perhaps, but it would be like buying a newsstand to censor a newspaper. The data is still freely available and will be distributed via another channel.
      - mikewarot 4y ago
        But will it really become available again? Or, more likely, like RSS, will this snuff it out. It's amazing how someone with a bit of capital and time can control almost anything that offends them.
      - inferiorhuman 4y ago
        That sort of irrational behavior makes me wonder if das muskrat has his paws in this. If he was willing to drop $44 billion on Twitter, this is pocket change by comparison. And he's been desperately trying to get that guy to stop tracking his jet. The data is still freely available and will be distributed via another channel. The ADS-B transmissions are still freely available but the value is in the aggregate product. In the case of ADS-B Exchange that aggregate takes a ton of work from volunteers who (if the comments here are any indication) are inclined to stop volunteering. An ADS-B receiver has a range of dozens, maybe hundreds of miles. Without that network of volunteers Joe Schmo in Santa Cruz will have no way of tuning in to that freely observable transponder in Austin.
        nocoiner 4y ago
        There’s most definitely a coordination problem to be solve to recreate that network, and I don’t mean to understate the difficulty of that at all, but I’m wondering if a (reconstituted) network of a small-ish number of volunteers could scale up to, say, 80% of the current ADSB Exchange coverage surprisingly quickly? My feeder, which cost maybe $100 all-in (pi + sdr + antenna; though the pi was much cheaper then than it is now) has full coverage of two major airports. Normal range is 200 miles (obviously dependent on altitude) and sometimes picks up plans ~250 miles away, I assume depending on relatively rare atmospheric conditions. With reasonably optimal distribution of what, a few hundred receivers, my mental math is suggesting you could cover a majority of the continental U.S. landmass and a large majority of its population and air traffic? Again, not to understand the magnitude of this. But if someone’s objective is generally to redistribute public data, or track Gulfstreams on their way to Omaha during times of financial upheaval, or poke a finger in the eye of the private jet lobby, but not to create a 99% comprehensive, monetizable data source for a sale to private equity - maybe it’s not crazy infeasible?
mindcrime 4y ago
I mean, if I were providing one of these feeds, I'd probably shut it down and look for (or create) a new community-driven alternative.
- capableweb 4y ago
  I chose to contribute my collected ADS-B data to ADS-B Exchange rather than Flightradar24 just because ADS-B Exchange was community driven and not owned by a company. I just turned off my sharing and looking for alternatives. If anyone know of any, please share them :)
  - nerpderp82 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - Operyl 4y ago
      Man, the blockchain being inserted wherever it doesn't need to be is becoming rampant on HN, isn't it? Humor me, though, how would that work and why would the cost of running a "blockchain," both in terms of money and energy wasted, be better than a simple feed aggregator?
      - nerpderp82 4y ago
        A signed append only log, distributed with webtorrent would provide provenance and distribution. This would allow for not having to have dedicated infrastructure for collection. One could also use USENET and get rid of the garbage will killfiles.
        Operyl 4y ago
        And who maintains the signing keys? It's just as centralized, with tons more complexity.. EDIT: Regardless, the point I'm making is this is just way more work for something that really doesn't need a blockchain.
wpietri 4y ago
I might feel similarly, especially given my distaste for private equity. But in the AIS (ship tracking) space, commercial versions seem to do ok. MarineTraffic runs its own blatantly commercial effort. And AIShub.net is not commercial itself, but it is run by Astra Paging, which definitely is. I run a receiver that feeds into both networks, and in both cases I look at it as a value-for-value exchange.
dgacmu 4y ago
Some are likely to, but remember that feeding is a mutual exchange - sites that you feed to generally give you a free, no ads account. I feed both ADS-B exchange and flightaware for this reason. Although I will admit that the flight aware app is more useful unless you're interested in unfiltered data. Contributing to an unfiltered source is one motivation, but it's one of several.
- jvanvleet 4y ago
  This is my situation as well. If you travel a lot, having something light Flightaware giving you more detailed information about what is really happening with your flight or airport is wonderful and starting a feed was a fun way to get more features.
  - sokoloff 4y ago
    I have a basic (free) Flightaware account. I can't imagine anything relevant to commercial airliner travel that I'd need that I don't get from that free account. Is there something I'm missing? (I totally get the fun aspect and it's fairly cheap to put a receiver up.)
    - dgacmu 4y ago
      the only value for me is having no ads. which is, in fact, something i value, but not at the $80/month it would take to subscribe for. But it's worth sending my feed.
    - james_pm 4y ago
      From FR24, you get two years of historical data for starters.
    - Scoundreller 4y ago
      Lots of interesting stuff outside of commercial airliners. Flightaware (and FR24) censors (for a fee). I remember emailing a journo covering a protest to look up and observe the plane circling around. But ultimately they’re different services: Adsb is vessel focussed, while FA/FR24 are flight# focussed. Want to find out what routes your aircraft typically flies? Adsb will be the place to check. Want to see if your flight is typically on-time? FA/FR24.
sschueller 4y ago
Well I for one will stop feeding them.

robbiet480 4y ago

Already seeing a lot of people in ADS-B Discords saying they are cutting off their feeds because they feel sold out.

myself248 4y ago
Is the codebase open / is anyone spinning up an alternative yet?
- notahacker 4y ago
  Not sure how it matches feature for feature, but https://opensky-network.org https://opensky-network.org has been crowdsourcing unfiltered ADSB data for longer, provides tools to view the data and supplies full API access to the raw data to academics and non-profits at no charge. There's room for another provider, and at the same time lots of enthusiasts with the boxes will carry on sending it, like they do to other closed source, profit-making ventures like FlightAware and Flightradar24...
  - myself248 4y ago
    Alright, so OpenSky and ADSB Hub are the two I've learned about so far in this thread. Very cool.
    - mike_d 4y ago
      Airframes.io is where everyone is moving to.
      - H8crilA 4y ago
        Note that at the moment aiframes is for a completely different type of aviation-produced data (messages: acars, hfdl, vdl, ...). I am assuming that airframes.io will create an ADS-B feed too, now that the best open system (adsbexchange) is gone.
      - rektide 4y ago

lsllc 4y ago

I wonder if this was done to stop trackers like @ElonJet since ADS-B Exchange doesn't seem to support the "privacy" requests of the rich & famous as FlightAware / FlightRadar24 et al do. https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-private-jet-no-longer-appearing-on-public-tracking-2022-12 https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-private-jet-no-lon...

cobertos 4y ago
Interestingly, ADS-B Exchange's twitter is suspended when I looked to see if there was any news updates there
- wkat4242 4y ago
  That's because they pissed off Elon by supplying the source data for ElonJet. He's been on a banning spree for weeks. Anyone who so much as mentioned the account would get the banhammer.
  - cactusplant7374 4y ago
    You can still post the link with TinyURL or another URL shortener.
sftomato 4y ago
Let's not forget that thanks to adsb-exchange, authorities were also able to track Jeffrey Epstein's private jets. https://www.insider.com/jeffrey-epsteins-private-jet-flight-data-2019-7 https://www.insider.com/jeffrey-epsteins-private-jet-flight-... https://github.com/adsbxchange/Jeffrey_Epstein_Lolita_Express https://github.com/adsbxchange/Jeffrey_Epstein_Lolita_Expres...
- mlindner 4y ago
  All of this information is public and known to the government. ADBS Exchange didn't provide anything that wasn't already available.

arprocter 4y ago

>maintaining our enthusiast roots and unfiltered data Interesting to see if a certain someone's jet(s) remain trackable

dgacmu 4y ago

I cynically wonder how much they'll start charging billionaires to hide their private jet info.

jgalt212 4y ago
or at the very least, the partners at Silversmith will have a long list of billionaires who owe them favors.
sschueller 4y ago
Cynic in me thinks the was arranged by billionaires that don't want to be tracked. Chump change for them.

myself248 4y ago

Well, fuck. Companies eat things to kill them because it works. Only some fraction of users will jump to the alternative, and indeed the alternative never ends up as strong as the original. Are there examples of where the alternative turned out stronger?

ninjagoo 4y ago
LibreOffice is a good example.
- account42 4y ago
  As far as mindshare goes, I'm not so sure. Plenty of people that still only know "Open Office" even if some of them are actually using LibreOffice.

jmyeet 4y ago

Years ago compact disc metadata was really important. There was an open library for this called CDDB. At some point the owners of that started silently inserting an agreement by the user to assign ownership of the submissions to the company. That “open” database got sold off and became Gracenote [1]. I’m not sure how many times we need to learn this lesson. [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gracenote https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gracenote

wpietri 4y ago
Not to be cynical, but I doubt the lesson will ever get learned. These things start with big ideas, hope, and an ignorance of the practical details. Over time, practical realities, like paying for goods and services, crop up. In a capitalist society, most of the ready-made solutions to that look like businesses. And our current culture of capitalism then shifts toward short-term revenue-maximization, putting things in the hands of predators and sociopaths. I know people have made attempts to solve this, like B Corps and groups like the Apache Foundation. But I don't think we're there yet. One could try to create a foundation that specifically incubates projects that go beyond open source to open/collective services. But even if one solves funding for that, there's still the problem of finding the naive starters of things and crushing their dreams just enough to get them on a better course, but not so much that they quit.
- tialaramex 4y ago
  Because profit motive is the usual problem, you can deliberately design that out if you're careful. England (where I live) had a lot of Building Societies - mutual institutions where some members are saving money, and those savings are lent to other members (borrowers) to buy homes to live in, the interest from which of course makes this a good deal for the savers done at scale (so as to smooth out inevitable losses when some borrowers default). This can be a very lucrative line of business during a housing boom, and many of these societies found themselves with a considerable cash positive position in the 1980s. Since the members own the society, they can just change the rules of the society and "demutualize", extracting the cash for themselves. Of course this destroys the society, an important institution which has helped so many people to own somewhere to live - but hey, you've got some money and isn't that what's really important? My parents voted "Yes" to demutualize the society where they'd saved money and from which they had borrowed to buy the house I grew up in, I (as an idealistic teenager who had my own modest savings) voted "No", the "Yes" votes won and the resulting entity, now a bank, eventually was mired in scandal and no longer serves the purpose the proud building society had served before. But hey, they got their money. People like them were nicknamed "Carpetbaggers" in the UK as a result, by analogy to the US concept. Now, I mention this because as several larger societies were demutualised this way, the remainder realised that the same fate could be theirs, and many swallowed a "poison pill" to prevent it. They changed their rules so that all future members (savers, borrowers, whichever) signed away rights to the proceeds of any demutualisation (e.g. giving it to a charity). So you could vote to tear the society to pieces, but you would no longer make a penny from doing so, and suddenly that's not very attractive. It worked.

vlovich123 4y ago

Out of curiosity, how does this community effort do quality control (ie preventing someone rich from paying some people to flood the system with conflicting information)

dgacmu 4y ago
There's a protocol for multilateration of the detected jets using all of the receivers that are in range of its signal. Whil I'm sure there are ways you could attack it, it's pretty robust to the more obvious things.
- wkat4242 4y ago
  The mlat is more for receiving aircraft that use traditional transponders which don't include gps coordinates but just a squawk code and altitude. Hence it needs multiple receivers to triangulate their location. I don't think it uses this for real adsb feeds.
- vlovich123 4y ago
  Would switching to a federated / distributed protocol fix things? Or is there some additional critical role that ADS-B was providing?
Cesartheiceman 4y ago
We have a community in RadarBox and that we have direct contact with the developers: RadarBox.com/addcoverage

toomuchtodo 4y ago

Anyone want to work together on spinning up a non profit replacement with governance that prohibits a transfer of ownership to a for profit entity?

wpietri 4y ago
I run an AIS receiver and have previously run a technical co-op. I am happy to chat, although I don't have time to do much direct labor right now. But the first questions I'd want to answer: 1) What will participants get out of it? 2) How will you pay for the central services used? 3) Where there isn't enough volunteer labor, how will you pay for needed labor? I don't want to discourage anybody, but there are some hard sustainability problems there.
- andiareso 4y ago
  I'm interested in helping as well (software engineer). This is such a loss for the community. Like other's have stated, ADS-B exchange didn't have to follow the privacy requests as they didn't aggregate FAA data so it remained open. I'm wondering what the future will hold with the new ownership.
- notahacker 4y ago
  Depending on what sort of commercial arrangements participants were happy with, the obvious fundraising options are selling value added services or derived data on top or classic FOSS 'sponsorship' with corporate partners (hard to get for a new project in this space). That doesn't guarantee sustainability of course, particularly with there being a lot of competition in this sector with good coverage already. (FWIW I'm happy to chat: have sold non-ADSB aviation data and consulting before and been involved with buying ADSB and AIS from a commercial provider)
  - wpietri 4y ago
    Having been both on the buy and sell side is a very valuable perspective to include. Do you have a sense of where some good dividing lines are between what to give to the general public, what contributors get, and what is marketable? As an example, AISHub data contributors get a free real-time stream of global data in the same format that comes out of an AIS receiver. They also get limited API access: https://www.aishub.net/api https://www.aishub.net/api On top of that, the company that runs AISHub sells both software and data services: http://www.astrapaging.com/data-services http://www.astrapaging.com/data-services

yardie 4y ago

One of the first projects I created with the Raspberry Pi Model A was setup a SDR listening station. Then I wrote some software and downloaded software to listen and stream ADS-B data to a few aggregators. One of them was ADS-B Exchange. The other was ADS-B Hub[0]. The later is still free and still open source. [0] https://www.adsbhub.org/ https://www.adsbhub.org/

H8crilA 4y ago
Thanks, I'm switching my feeds from the shitty people behind ADSBExchange.
- commandersaki 4y ago
  Just to be clear it’s the owner/founder that’s being shitty. The people behind running the infrastructure are against the acquisition. It’s also unclear whether they’re getting paid (enough) to transition the servers to the new company.
Cesartheiceman 4y ago
Yardie, I am a feeder and share data with RadarBox. For me, it is the best flight tracking website and I also get 10% off on hardware products.

huslage 4y ago

Does anyone want to fund an open ADSB data gathering platform for a nonprofit to run?

gggggg5 4y ago
GDPR compliance is a big problem in this space, there's no GDPR exception which would allow you to legally collect this data in the EU. (Unless you limited your collection to whitelisted A/C) Right now every single player in this space is operating illegally, but it'll probably take years before data protection authorities will start to crack down.
- looping__lui 4y ago
  Yes, and FR24 is investigated in the EU: https://se.linkedin.com/pulse/en-digitalsektor-ger-imy-m%C3%A5nga-klagom%C3%A5l-fr%C3%A5n-andra-eu-l%C3%A4nder-borre https://se.linkedin.com/pulse/en-digitalsektor-ger-imy-m%C3%...
- sigmar 4y ago
  Is SDR accessible through the internet a violation of GDPR? Hard for me to understand why relaying ADS-B would be different (considering the sdr data is inclusive of the ADS-B data)
  - tialaramex 4y ago
    I'm going to guess that collecting / organising the data is a problem. Data Protection laws, and I believe the GDPR is the same, aren't interested in just stuff you've got, for example if you write a blog, and you mention that you saw Jim at the weekend and his sister is apparently pregnant, these laws do not consider that you've got a database there with a single row ("Jim's sister" "Pregnant") which needs to be treated as PII and have Subject access requirements etc. You're not really collecting pregnancy status data about women, you just have a blog post. Whereas if I build a scraper, and I search thousands of blogs and correlate stuff to build a Postgres DB with "Jim's sister" "Pregnant" as one of dozens of rows, that is the sort of thing these laws care about. So I can imagine that likewise "Here are radio signals I am receiving" looks like public information, no big deal, whereas "Here is a database of records I gathered by studying the past 24 hours of radio signals" is different.

femboy 4y ago

The Discord link on ADSBExchange points to a server called "Airframes.io Enthusiasts" - going to the website shows: > Airframes is an aircraft-related aggregation service that receives ACARS, VDL, HFDL, and SATCOM data from volunteers around the world. > It is under very active development and you will notice changes from day to day. Also, issues are expected. > Contributing your feed allows us to make ground developing new decoders and make important statistical observations. It also benefits users of the service so that they can see more about flights as they traverse covered territories. Perhaps the original founders' work will continue here? EDIT: It does not seem like the original founders has collaborated with the community on this, and the people there are just as lost as anyone else.

cobertos 4y ago
The discord was originally the ADSBExchange discord, but, I believe a mod has taken control, banned the person who owned/sold ADSBExchange (Dan Streufert) and made a bunch of announcements. The mod used to have Outlook email access on the original domain, so it seems like there's kind of a shakeup going on as well It's kind of chaos currently. I only joined this Discord in December and it was very different then. It seemed to be pretty community oriented, with images for RaspPi and scripts to help setup feeding and the developers of these tools were in there chatting. Not company employed people to my knowledge.

oldstrangers 4y ago

Well that sucks. I had just gotten into using ADS-B over Flightradar24.

Havoc 4y ago
That shouldn't be affected by the matter at hand. ADS-B is the coms standard, ADS-B Exchange is a specific aggregation effort.
- oldstrangers 4y ago
  Well that sucks. I had just gotten into using ADS-B Exchange over Flightradar24.

jmacd 4y ago

Just unplugged my receiver.

prova_modena 4y ago

Well, dang. I have been maintaining a Twitter bot that uses the ADS-B Exchange API, but paused development after Musk started going after ElonJet aggressively and Twitter began to ban aircraft tracking accounts. I just restarted work this week to implement Mastodon support, but looks like I need to pause again to reassess what ADS-B data source(s) to support. I would really like to know the story behind this acquisition as my previous interactions with the ADS-B Exchange owner (edit: after checking back in on the discord maybe this person was not the owner, but one of the main team members) on discord were positive and they seemed like a very passionate and principled person. This was like more than 1 year ago now, though. My suspicion is that the loud, polarized public discourse around the ElonJet controversy, which led to ADS-B Exchange getting banned from Twitter, may have caused them to reassess their priorities. I hope they are not under any kind of legal threat from Musk.

nocoiner 4y ago

Welps, shutting off my feed today. I was actually thinking about this exact scenario just last week. Funny to hear that it happened.

wkat4242 4y ago
Funny but also sad :(

nocoiner 4y ago

I don’t mind feeding FlightAware and Flightradar24 - they’re for-profit companies, and are clear about the terms of exchange something of (dubious) value for the data they receive. This feels a lot more skeezy. Oh well, fool me once, and all that. I do look forward to shutting down my feed once I’m back in front of a computer. Something something, why we can’t have nice things.

james_pm 4y ago
Same. I get value back from FR24 in the form of a Business subscription which gives me a TON of data and access I wouldn't be able to afford. I fed ADS-B Exchange for nothing because it seemed like a nice thing to do to benefit the wider tracking community. To have the founder cash out and sell OUR data without even talking to the community first? That really rubbed me the wrong way. I stopped feeding about an hour ago.
- Havoc 4y ago
  Also doing same re FR24 and biz sub. Curious what data you use from it though? I haven't had much use for it frankly
  - james_pm 4y ago
    I'm interested in a lot of different forms of transportation as a hobby. Photography, tracking, etc. Being able to see the flight history of a specific airframe is interesting to me or going back and looking at past flights. Fleets is another feature I use. For example, I've been interested in trying to get photos of the new E915-E2 jets that Porter Airlines is adding so I've created a "fleet" and can easily track the whereabouts in the hopes of being able to catch one in flight to photograph.
    - Havoc 4y ago
      Got it. Thanks
metadaemon 4y ago

phkahler 4y ago

750,000 messages per second! Imagine if each node knew where it was and all of its nearest neighbors. The receivers could filter and not send messages that are coming from planes closer to their neighbors! Distributed filtering of redundant messages FTW!

sorenjan 4y ago
You need messages from multiple receivers for MLAT, I think they use messages with known plane positions to calibrate the MLAT solver since the receivers doesn't have a high quality common time source. Plus proximity doesn't mean you can see airplanes that are behind buildings, at low altitude, etc.
- phkahler 4y ago
  What is MLAT in this case? The planes transmit their location in the ADS-B message. They are filtering a lot of redundant message receptions from multiple receivers. I would assume the messages also include altitude and heading information, so locations can be predicted between message receptions.
  - sorenjan 4y ago
    MLAT is multilateration, where they use the difference in time of arrival to multiple receivers with known locations to estimate the positions of planes that doesn't transmit their location using ADS-B but only use older Mode S. This is mostly small or military planes. https://flightaware.com/adsb/mlat/ https://flightaware.com/adsb/mlat/
KirillPanov 4y ago
> 750,000 messages per second! ZOMG, that's like... a 1990s DSL connection!
- mkl 4y ago
  Only if your messages are 1 byte long or something.

rhacker 4y ago

This isn't going to go over well. I hope everyone shuts down their feed.

nerpderp82 4y ago
Most likely the goal.
- wkat4242 4y ago
  I don't know, now that they own it they can just start censoring it like the others. And I'm sure at least one alternative will pop up

donaldcjackson 4y ago

I suggest that folks that want to feed open ADSB aggregators consider feeding https://opensky-network.org https://opensky-network.org

everybodyknows 4y ago
Interesting possibilities here: > You can now feed VHF/voice data to OpenSky and help researchers around the world. Check out the interface and set up a feeder at https://ui.atc.opensky-network.org/ https://ui.atc.opensky-network.org/

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

squarefoot 4y ago

Time to move the ADSB sharing network over p2p? Assuming it's doable, that way whoever buys an aggregator site would own just the interface, not the data sharing network.

wkat4242 4y ago

Oh nooo.. Now there's no volunteer driven tracking network left. And they'll probably start blocking military and private flights just like the other commercial trackers. Too bad, it was great while it lasted. Hopefully someone starts up a new one that will stay independent.

tecleandor 4y ago

The dullest non-announce ever: https://twitter.com/ADSBex/status/1618306706861338625 https://twitter.com/ADSBex/status/1618306706861338625 Hasn't said anything in the forum or the site news section, and hasn't posted that tweet until after the official announce by Jetnet. Looks like a case of "take the money and run". Doesn't smell good for the ads-b community.

plantain 4y ago

Good. ADS-B Exchange's API is horribly broken and they never even replied to my support/refund requests so I had to chargeback. A shakeup might help.

Cesartheiceman 4y ago
I am a RadarBox feeder and can use the API. I use it for some of my applications.

reallymental 4y ago

Is there any service like this for AIS data?

Cesartheiceman 4y ago
Yes, ShipXplorer.

evil-olive 4y ago

if this news has gotten anyone interested in running an ADSB antenna/feeder, the SDR Enthusiasts book [0] is an excellent resource. their github [1] has a bunch of very nice, modular Docker images that make it easy to feed one or more ADSB aggregators. (by comparison, a lot of the other software ecosystem around amateur SDR / ADSB relies on `curl | sudo bash` type install scripts) 0: https://sdr-enthusiasts.gitbook.io/ads-b/ https://sdr-enthusiasts.gitbook.io/ads-b/ 1: https://github.com/sdr-enthusiasts https://github.com/sdr-enthusiasts

Havoc 4y ago
Thanks. Will try to tweak my setup to feed all of them. Don’t really see the point in being stingy with this info
RNAlfons 4y ago
It actually really did get me interested in the topic. I have a raspi which doesn't do much left. I guess I'll add it to the network soon. Thank you :)

Awelton 4y ago

Looks like I am going to stop feeding then. Donating electricity and bandwidth to an open source project and donating to a massive corporation just aren't the same thing. Pay me and I will turn it back on, but until then I guess it is going to sit idle.

esjr 4y ago

I run this site : https://ducis.net/ https://ducis.net/ It is a hobby that got out of hand. The idea was/is to see what this data reveals. What can be learned just by observing 'traffic'. The answer is : a lot and I know various agencies and governments freaked out when they realized how visible some things are. Basically, with enough 'training' and domain-knowledge it's all pretty much out there : military transports, private military contractors, refugee flights, mercenaries, embargo busters, the spooks etc. Obviously there was a reaction. Over the years they've tried to tidy things up with some success by putting pressure on the tracker-sites (or simply attacking the small players' servers). Anyway, the point is : it is complex and fascinating. I'm not interested in shouting "SECRET flight..." for clicks but if someone wants to try and set up a new 'ADS-B Exchange' : basically free, responsible, open source etc and wants to take on board a couple of years of deep domain-knowledge and decades of coding skills, contact details are on the site. I know this is like a shameless (well) plug but...it's complicated ;)

yooo000 4y ago

The dude who owned it was kind of a douche to start with, as I recall. That being said, I think I'd be hard-pressed not to sell something I started as a hobby that grew and grew. Speaking of which, I created my own site[1] within the past couple of years...have a few friends feeding data. I set them up with Pi's, antennas, cords and the proper software. Would be super stoked if anyone else wanted to feed me! [1]https://radar.airport-frequencies.com https://radar.airport-frequencies.com Hit me up if you want to join!