1090 MHz
ADS-B and Mode S
Aircraft on a map with callsign, altitude, speed, track and position, read off the 1090 MHz downlink alongside everything else in the span.
Mode S is the transponder reply every airliner sends, and ADS-B is the part of it that carries a position the aircraft worked out for itself. WaveShark reads both span-wide rather than on a channel, because a Mode S frame is shorter than a detector frame, and puts each aircraft on the map with a track table beside it.
A single position frame from an aircraft you have no pair for still places it, as long as the receiver knows where it is: give it --location or set the station position and the surface position decoding has its reference. A mark drawn from one frame is hollow and never joins a trail, so a guess never becomes a track.
Checked against dump1090 on the same recordings, which is the only way to know a decoder is right rather than merely confident.
What comes out
- ICAO address, and the callsign when the aircraft sends one
- Altitude, ground speed, heading and vertical rate
- Position, with the range ring drawn from your antenna
- Squawk, and the emergency codes as they are set
$ waveshark --tune 1090 --location 53.34,-6.26 --flightsRead next
Something did not decode?
Record the burst with --record and open an issue with the capture. A capture that decodes becomes a test fixture.
Open an issue