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mikenye/readsb

GitHub Workflow Status Docker Pulls Docker Image Size (tag) Discord

Mictronics' readsb Mode-S/ADSB/TIS decoder for RTLSDR, BladeRF, Modes-Beast and GNS5894 devices, running in a docker container.

Support for RTLSDR, bladeRF and plutoSDR is compiled in. Builds and runs on x86, x86_64, arm32v6, arm32v7 and arm64.

This image will configure a software-defined radio (SDR) to receive and decode Mode-S/ADSB/TIS data from aircraft within range, for use with other services such as:

  • mikenye/adsbexchange to feed ADSB data to adsbexchange.com
  • mikenye/piaware to feed ADSB data into flightaware.com
  • mikenye/fr24feed to feed ADSB data into flightradar24.com
  • mikenye/piaware-to-influx to feed data into your own instance of InfluxDB, for visualisation with Grafana and/or other tools
  • Any other tools that can receive Beast, BeastReduce, Basestation or the raw data feed from readsb or dump1090 and their variants

bladeRF & plutoSDR are untested - I don't own bladeRF or plutoSDR hardware (only RTL2832U as outlined above), but support for the devices is compiled in. If you have the hardware and would be willing to test, please open an issue on GitHub.

Deprecation notice

The author of readsb (Mictronics) is no longer developing readsb, and instead all future development efforts will go into the Protocol Buffer version (readsb-protobuf) starting with version v4.0.0 (see here).

I would recommend migrating to the container: mikenye/readsb-protobuf instead of continuing to use this container.

Supported tags and respective Dockerfiles

  • latest should always contain the latest released versions of rtl-sdr, bladeRF, libiio, libad9361-iio and readsb. This image is built nightly from the master branch Dockerfile for all supported architectures.
  • latest_nohealthcheck is the same as the latest version above. However, this version has the docker healthcheck removed. This is done for people running platforms (such as Nomad) that don't support manually disabling healthchecks, where healthchecks are not wanted.
  • Specific version and architecture tags are available if required, however these are not regularly updated. It is generally recommended to run latest.

Multi Architecture Support

Currently, this image should pull and run on the following architectures:

  • amd64: Linux x86-64
  • arm32v7, armv7l: ARMv7 32-bit (Odroid HC1/HC2/XU4, RPi 2/3)
  • arm64v8, aarch64: ARMv8 64-bit (RPi 3B+/4)

Prerequisites

Before this container will work properly, you must blacklist the kernel modules for the RTL-SDR USB device from the host's kernel.

To do this, create a file /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-rtl2832.conf containing the following:

# Blacklist RTL2832 so docker container readsb can use the device

blacklist rtl2832
blacklist dvb_usb_rtl28xxu
blacklist rtl2832_sdr

Once this is done, you can plug in your RTL-SDR USB device and start the container.

Failure to do this will result in the error below being spammed to the container log.

usb_claim_interface error -6
rtlsdr: error opening the RTLSDR device: Device or resource busy

If you get the error above even after blacklisting the kernel modules as outlined above, the modules may still be loaded. You can unload them by running the following commands:

sudo rmmod rtl2832_sdr
sudo rmmod dvb_usb_rtl28xxu
sudo rmmod rtl2832

Healthcheck

In order for the container's health check to be the most effective, you should be sure to include --write-json=/run/readsb.

If the healthcheck script can't find /run/readsb/aircraft.json, it will skip some checks.

Up-and-Running with docker run

Firstly, plug in your USB radio.

Run the command lsusb and find your radio. It'll look something like this:

Bus 001 Device 004: ID 0bda:2832 Realtek Semiconductor Corp. RTL2832U DVB-T

Take note of the bus number, and device number. In the output above, its 001 and 004 respectively.

Start the docker container, passing through the USB device:

docker run \
 -d \
 --rm \
 --name readsb \
 --device /dev/bus/usb/USB_BUS_NUMBER/USB_DEVICE_NUMBER \
 -p 8080:8080 \
 -p 30005:30005 \
 -e TZ=YOURTIMEZONE \
 mikenye/readsb \
 --dcfilter \
 --device-type=rtlsdr \
 --fix \
 --json-location-accuracy=2 \
 --lat=YOUR_LATITUDE \
 --lon=YOUR_LONGITUDE \
 --modeac \
 --ppm=0 \
 --net \
 --stats-every=3600 \
 --quiet \
 --write-json=/run/readsb

For example, based on the lsusb output above:

docker run \
 -d \
 --rm \
 --name readsb \
 --device /dev/bus/usb/001/004 \
 -p 8080:8080 \
 -p 30005:30005 \
 -e TZ=Australia/Perth \
 mikenye/readsb \
 --dcfilter \
 --device-type=rtlsdr \
 --fix \
 --json-location-accuracy=2 \
 --lat=-33.33333 \
 --lon=111.11111 \
 --modeac \
 --ppm=0 \
 --net \
 --stats-every=3600 \
 --quiet \
 --write-json=/run/readsb

Up-and-Running with Docker Compose

Firstly, plug in your USB radio.

Run the command lsusb and find your radio. It'll look something like this:

Bus 001 Device 004: ID 0bda:2832 Realtek Semiconductor Corp. RTL2832U DVB-T

Take note of the bus number, and device number. In the output above, its 001 and 004 respectively. This is used in the devices: section of the docker-compose.yml. Change these in your environment as required.

An example docker-compose.yml file is below:

version: '2.0'

networks:
  adsbnet:

services:

  readsb:
    image: mikenye/readsb:latest
    tty: true
    container_name: readsb
    restart: always
    devices:
      - /dev/bus/usb/001/007:/dev/bus/usb/001/007
    ports:
      - 8080:8080
      - 30005:30005
    networks:
      - adsbnet
    environment:
      - TZ=Australia/Perth
    command:
      - --dcfilter
      - --device-type=rtlsdr
      - --fix
      - --json-location-accuracy=2
      - --lat=-33.33333
      - --lon=111.11111
      - --modeac
      - --ppm=0
      - --net
      - --stats-every=3600
      - --quiet
      - --write-json=/run/readsb

The reason for creating a specific docker network and volume makes it easier to feed data into other containers. This will be explained further below.

Testing the container

Once running, you can test the container to ensure it is correctly receiving & decoding ADSB traffic by issuing the command:

docker exec -it readsb viewadsb

Which should display a departure-lounge-style screen showing all the aircraft being tracked, for example:

 Hex    Mode  Sqwk  Flight   Alt    Spd  Hdg    Lat      Long   RSSI  Msgs  Ti -
────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
 7C801C S                     8450  256  296                   -28.0    14  1
 7C8148 S                     3900                             -21.5    19  0
 7C7A48 S     1331  VOZ471   28050  468  063  -31.290  117.480 -26.8    48  0
 7C7A4D S     3273  VOZ694   13100  376  077                   -29.1    14  1
 7C7A6E S     4342  YGW       1625  109  175  -32.023  115.853  -5.9    71  0
 7C7A71 S           YGZ        725   64  167  -32.102  115.852 -27.1    26  0
 7C42D1 S                    32000  347  211                   -32.0     4  1
 7C42D5 S                    33000  421  081  -30.955  118.568 -28.7    15  0
 7C42D9 S     4245  NWK1643   1675  173  282  -32.043  115.961 -13.6    60  0
 7C431A S     3617  JTE981   24000  289  012                   -26.7    41  0
 7C1B2D S     3711  VOZ9242  11900  294  209  -31.691  116.118  -9.5    65  0
 7C5343 S           QQD      20000  236  055  -30.633  116.834 -25.5    27  0
 7C6C96 S     1347  JST116   24000  397  354  -30.916  115.873 -17.5    62  0
 7C6C99 S     3253  JST975    2650  210  046  -31.868  115.993  -2.5    70  0
 76CD03 S     1522  SIA214     grnd   0                        -22.5     7  0
 7C4513 S     4220  QJE1808   3925  282  279  -31.851  115.887  -1.9    35  0
 7C4530 S     4003  NYA      21925  229  200  -30.933  116.640 -19.8    58  0
 7C7533 S     3236  XFP       4300  224  266  -32.066  116.124  -6.9    74  0
 7C4D44 S     3730  PJQ      20050  231  199  -31.352  116.466 -20.1    62  0
 7C0559 S     3000  BCB       1000                             -18.4    28  0
 7C0DAA S     1200            2500  146  002  -32.315  115.918 -26.6    48  0
 7C6DD7 S     1025  QFA793   17800  339  199  -31.385  116.306  -8.7    53  0
 8A06F0 S     4131  AWQ544    6125  280  217  -32.182  116.143 -12.6    61  0
 7CF7C4 S           PHRX1A                                     -13.7     8  1
 7CF7C5 S           PHRX1B                                     -13.3     9  1
 7C77F6 S           QFA595     grnd 112  014                   -33.2     2  2

Press CTRL-C to escape this screen.

You should also be able to point your web browser at http://dockerhost:8080/ to view the web interface. At the time of writing this readme (readsb v3.8.1), the webapp is still being actively developed. I was able to get a usable interface with Firefox.

Runtime Command Line Arguments

To get a list of command line arguments, you can issue the following command:

docker run --rm -it mikenye/readsb --help

The command line variables given in the examples above should work for the vast majority of ADSB set-ups.

"MLAT Hub" Functionality

The command line argument PULLMLAT can be specified with the syntax of: MLATHOST:MLATPORT[,MLATHOST:MLATPORT,...].

If set, then a separate instance of readsb will be started in --net-only mode, configured to pull MLAT data from mlat-clients running on other containers, listen on TCP port 30105 and forward MLAT data to any clients that connect on this port. This may be useful for tools such as graphs1090 and/or tar1090.

For example:

...
    environment:
      - PULLMLAT=piaware:30105,adsbx:30105,rbfeeder:30105
...

Runtime Environment Variables

There are a series of available environment variables:

Environment Variable Purpose Default
TZ Your local timezone (recommended) UTC
PULLMLAT See above (optional)

Ports

The following default ports are used by readsb and this container:

  • 8080 - readsb webapp - optional but recommended so you can look at the pretty maps and watch the planes fly around. For the web interface to function, you must include the command line argument --write-json=/run/readsb.
  • 30001 - readsb TCP raw input listen port - optional, recommended to leave unmapped unless explicitly needed
  • 30002 - readsb TCP raw output listen port - optional, recommended to leave unmapped unless explicitly needed
  • 30003 - readsb TCP BaseStation output listen port - optional, recommended to leave unmapped unless explicitly needed
  • 30004 - readsb TCP Beast input listen port - optional, recommended to leave unmapped unless explicitly needed
  • 30005 - readsb TCP Beast output listen port - optional but recommended to allow other applications to receive the data provided by readsb
  • 30104 - readsb TCP Beast input listen port - optional, recommended to leave unmapped unless explicitly needed
  • 30105 - readsb TCP "MLAT Hub" Beast output port - optional. See "MLAT Hub" Functionality above.

Logging

All logs are to the container's log. It is recommended to enable docker log rotation to prevent container logs from filling up your hard drive. See Configure the default logging driver for details on how to achieve this.

Getting help

Please feel free to open an issue on the project's GitHub.

I also have a Discord channel, feel free to join and converse.

Changelog

See the project's commit history.