// the find
rsadsb/adsb_deku
✈️ Rust ADS-B decoder + tui radar application
A Rust library for decoding ADS-B Mode S packets from 1090MHz, paired with a terminal radar application that lets you watch aircraft fly overhead using a cheap RTL-SDR dongle. The library handles the protocol parsing; a separate companion project (dump1090_rs) does the RF demodulation. Aimed at SDR hobbyists and anyone who wants to build their own flight tracking tooling in Rust.
The use of the `deku` crate for protocol deserialization is the right call — declarative bit-level parsing keeps the ADS-B message structures readable and close to the spec. The library is `no_std` compatible (there's a dedicated crate in the repo to enforce this), which means it could run on embedded targets. There's a fuzzing setup under `libadsb_deku/fuzz/`, which matters for a parser that ingests data from the air. The radar TUI has a coverage heatmap that accumulates all observed positions since startup — genuinely useful for characterizing your antenna's range.
The project split (demodulation lives in a separate repo, `dump1090_rs`) means setup requires you to find and run a second binary before anything works — the quickstart link will tell you, but it's still friction. CPR (Compact Position Reporting) decoding is notoriously fiddly, and there's no indication in the README how edge cases like single-message position decoding or airborne vs. surface CPR are handled. The TUI is a visual application that's hard to evaluate without actually running it against live data. Last push is early 2026 and the project is stable-ish, but with 31 forks and 719 stars it's clearly a niche tool; if you hit a bug in an obscure message type, you're probably fixing it yourself.