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

Copyright 2015, Oliver Jowett.

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/.