// the find
antirez/dump1090
Dump1090 is a simple Mode S decoder for RTLSDR devices
dump1090 is a Mode S/ADS-B decoder for RTL-SDR USB dongles, written by antirez (the Redis author) as a Christmas 2012 hobby project. It turns a $20 TV tuner into a live aircraft radar. Single C file, ~2900 lines, ships with a built-in HTTP server and Google Maps display.
The precomputed syndrome table for 1-2 bit CRC error correction is genuinely clever and explains why users report better range than competing decoders. The CPR surface position decoding — automatically deriving a reference position by averaging airborne fixes rather than asking the user to configure coordinates — is a nice algorithmic touch. The code is antirez-quality C: readable, well-commented, single-file, no build system complexity beyond a trivial Makefile. Network hub mode (--net-only feeding from /dev/zero) lets you aggregate multiple remote feeds without any extra tooling.
This is a 2012 hobby repo that the author explicitly says he touches only occasionally — the much more active fork (MalcolmRobb's, linked in the README) is where real development happened, and even that has been superseded by FlightAware's dump1090-fa and wiedehopf's readsb. Adopting this specific fork for anything production-adjacent means you're starting from a codebase that's 13 years behind. The embedded HTTP server serves an HTML page that references Google Maps without an API key, which broke years ago. No authentication or access control on any of the TCP ports — anyone on your network can feed arbitrary data into port 30001.