adsb-decode
A complete ADS-B aircraft tracking system — from raw 1090 MHz radio signals to identified aircraft on a live map. Built from scratch in Rust.
Every aircraft broadcasts its identity, position, altitude, and velocity on 1090 MHz. These signals are unencrypted and receivable by anyone with a $25 USB radio dongle. This system captures those raw radio signals and decodes them into live aircraft intelligence — no third-party decoder, no black box libraries. Every bit is parsed, validated, and decoded from the ICAO specification.
The system started as a Python reference decoder to prove the protocol math, then was rewritten in Rust for production. Both implementations were cross-validated frame-by-frame on a 296-frame capture — 100% field-level match, verified on every commit in CI.
Technology
Full source code, protocol documentation, and build instructions on GitHub.
The operator
Octo watches the skies.
The character that runs Blue Octopus Technology runs this project too. ADS-B feeds in, Octo monitors — live aircraft, callsigns, altitudes, anomalies. Same workshop, different console.
Meet Octo →Sibling project
Splatlas — ground truth for the airspace.
adsb-decode shows you what's flying overhead. Splatlas shows you what's flying overhead a real place.
3D Gaussian splat reconstructions of scanned sites — ballfields, properties, sensor pads — with live ADS-B and Starlink traffic rendered as laser vectors from a fixed observer point up to the hexagonal sky dome above. Walk three steps in the captured scene and the line-of-sight changes — trees, buildings, and ridgelines actually block the aircraft hexes you can't see from this exact ground position. No 2D map can show that.
Captured Splatlas scenes appear as pins on the map above. Click a pin to enter the viewer. As more places are scanned, they accumulate as an atlas of inhabited airspace.
Open Splatlas →Built by Blue Octopus Technology
We build data systems that turn messy inputs into clear intelligence — radio signals into aircraft maps, scattered business data into actionable dashboards, manual processes into automated pipelines.
If your business has data it's not using, we should talk.
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