// the find
wiedehopf/readsb
ADS-B decoder swiss knife
A heavily maintained fork of dump1090/readsb that decodes ADS-B signals from aircraft using RTL-SDR and other SDR hardware. It's the backend powering several major flight tracking aggregators (adsbexchange, adsb.fi, airplanes.live). Aimed at hobbyists running Raspberry Pi feeders and operators running large-scale ingest infrastructure.
- Actively maintained with real production use at scale - the code handles global aggregator workloads, not just hobbyist receivers, which means edge cases in CPR decoding, speed checking, and network protocols have been beaten on hard
- Solid networking layer: beast_reduce output intelligently throttles data to ~125ms intervals, failover connectors, multiple simultaneous output formats (Beast, SBS, ASTERIX, VRS, JSON), and a built-in HTTP API - covers most integration scenarios without middleware
- CPU efficiency is clearly a priority: tunable hash map size, SIMD-friendly demodulation, compile-time optimization flags documented for Pi Zero specifically, and autogain that doesn't require manual tuning
- macOS compat layer is genuinely functional with proper epoll shims and is available via Homebrew, which is unusual for this class of SDR software
- The README opens with 'expect bugs, segfaults and all the good stuff' - that's honest but also true; as a single-maintainer detached fork there's no formal release process, the data format is explicitly documented as unstable, and upgrading can break globe history compatibility
- net_io.c and track.c are massive files (the codebase has grown organically from dump1090 and it shows) - contributing or debugging requires significant context-building before touching anything
- Globe history / trace writing can generate thousands of files per day with no built-in rotation or cleanup tooling; the docs tell you to be aware of disk usage but give you nothing to manage it
- The HTTP API (--net-api-port) has minimal documentation in README-api.md and the tar1090 integration requires nginx config surgery - not something you can wire up quickly without already knowing the ecosystem