Awesome

mlat-client

This is a client that selectively forwards Mode S messages to a server that resolves the transmitter position by multilateration of the same message received by multiple clients.

The corresponding server code is available at https://github.com/wiedehopf/mlat-server.

Building

Due to conflicting packages with the same name, it's recommended to install in a Python virtual environment. First set the direcory you'd like to install to, if that path is not writeable by your user, use sudo su to become root first.

VENV=/usr/local/share/wiedehopf-mlat-client/venv

Now the build / install, it's not a bad idea to recreate the virtual environment when rebuilding:

rm -rf "$VENV"
python3 -m venv "$VENV"
source "$VENV/bin/activate"
python3 -c "import setuptools" || python3 -m pip install setuptools
python3 -c "import asyncore" || python3 -m pip install pyasyncore
python3 setup.py build
python3 setup.py install

Or you can run install.sh provided in this repository.

To run it, invoke:

/usr/local/share/wiedehopf-mlat-client/venv/bin/mlat-client

Running

If you are connecting to a third party multilateration server, contact the server's administrator for configuration instructions.

Supported receivers

Anything that produces Beast-format output with a 12MHz clock:
readsb, dump1090-mutability, dump1090-fa
an actual Mode-S Beast
airspy_adsb in Beast output mode
Radarcape in 12MHz mode
Radarcape in GPS mode

Unsupported receivers

The FlightRadar24 radarcape-based receiver. This produces a deliberately crippled timestamp in its output, making it useless for multilateration. If you have one of these, you should ask FR24 to fix this.

License

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.