Aviation & Infrastructure Networking

ADS-B Flight Tracker

Self-hosted flight tracking stack with custom visualization and mesh networking across every node.

SDRRTL-SDRRaspberry PiTailscaleLinuxWeb UI

The problem

I wanted my own view of the airspace above the house — not someone else's aggregated feed — and I wanted every node in the setup reachable without opening a single inbound port.

How it's built

RTL-SDR dongle on a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W decoding 1090 MHz ADS-B
SSD1306 OLED on the Pi showing live aircraft counts and receiver health
Setup script that feeds multiple public flight-tracking networks from one receiver
Tailscale mesh joining VPS, home LAN, and the receiver; a subnet router exposes the LAN to the tailnet
Web front end rendering traffic in an amber CRT aesthetic over a local coverage map

Architecture

  1090 MHz ))) [ RTL-SDR + Pi Zero 2 W ] ──┐
                        │ OLED status         │
                        └────────────┐        │
                                     ▼        ▼
        [ home LAN ] <── subnet router ── [ Tailscale mesh ] ──> [ VPS + web UI ]