dump1090-fa Debian/Raspbian packages

dump1090-fa is a ADS-B, Mode S, and Mode 3A/3C demodulator and decoder that will receive and decode aircraft transponder messages received via a directly connected software defined radio, or from data provided over a network connection.

It is the successor to dump1090-mutability and is maintained by FlightAware.

It can provide a display of locally received aircraft data in a terminal or via a browser map. Together with PiAware it can be used to contribute crowd-sourced flight tracking data to FlightAware.

It is designed to build as a Debian package, but should also be buildable on many other Linux or Unix-like systems.

Building under buster

$ sudo apt-get install build-essential debhelper librtlsdr-dev pkg-config dh-systemd libncurses5-dev libbladerf-dev libhackrf-dev liblimesuite-dev
$ dpkg-buildpackage -b --no-sign

Building under stretch

$ sudo apt-get install build-essential debhelper librtlsdr-dev pkg-config dh-systemd libncurses5-dev libbladerf-dev
$ dpkg-buildpackage -b --no-sign

Building under jessie

Dependencies - bladeRF

You will need a build of libbladeRF. You can build packages from source:

$ git clone https://github.com/Nuand/bladeRF.git  
$ cd bladeRF  
$ git checkout 2017.12-rc1  
$ dpkg-buildpackage -b

Or Nuand has some build/install instructions including an Ubuntu PPA at https://github.com/Nuand/bladeRF/wiki/Getting-Started:-Linux

Or FlightAware provides armhf packages as part of the piaware repository; see https://flightaware.com/adsb/piaware/install

Dependencies - rtlsdr

This is packaged with jessie. sudo apt-get install librtlsdr-dev

Actually building it

Nothing special, just build it (dpkg-buildpackage -b)

Building with limited dependencies

The package supports some build profiles to allow building without all required SDR libraries being present. This will produce a package with limited SDR support only.

Pass --build-profiles to dpkg-buildpackage with a comma-separated list of profiles. The list of profiles should include custom and zero or more of rtlsdr, bladerf, hackrf, limesdr depending on what you want:

$ dpkg-buildpackage -b --no-sign --build-profiles=custom,rtlsdr          # builds with rtlsdr support only
$ dpkg-buildpackage -b --no-sign --build-profiles=custom,rtlsdr,bladerf  # builds with rtlsdr and bladeRF support
$ dpkg-buildpackage -b --no-sign --build-profiles=custom                 # builds with _no_ SDR support (network support only)

Building manually

You can probably just run "make" after installing the required dependencies. Binaries are built in the source directory; you will need to arrange to install them (and a method for starting them) yourself.

make BLADERF=no will disable bladeRF support and remove the dependency on libbladeRF.

make RTLSDR=no will disable rtl-sdr support and remove the dependency on librtlsdr.

make HACKRF=no will disable HackRF support and remove the dependency on libhackrf.

make LIMESDR=no will disable LimeSDR support and remove the dependency on libLimeSuite.

Building on OSX

Minimal testing on Mojave 10.14.6, YMMV.

$ brew install librtlsdr
$ brew install libbladerf
$ brew install hackrf
$ brew install pkg-config
$ make

Building on FreeBSD

Minimal testing on 12.1-RELEASE, YMMV.

# pkg install gmake
# pkg install pkgconf
# pkg install rtl-sdr
# pkg install bladerf
# pkg install hackrf
$ gmake

Generating wisdom files

dump1090-fa uses starch to build multiple versions of the DSP code and choose the fastest supported by the hardware at runtime. The implementations chosen can been seen by running dump1090-fa --version.

The implementations used are controlled by "wisdom files", a list of implementations to use in order of priority. For each DSP function, the first implementation listed that's supported by the current hardware is used. By default dump1090-fa provides compiled-in wisdom for x86, ARM 32-bit, and ARM 64-bit. If the defaults are not suitable for your hardware or if you're building on a different architecture, you may want to generate your own external wisdom file.

Ideally, to get stable results, you want to do this on an idle system with CPU frequency scaling disabled. Running the benchmarks will take some time (10s of minutes).

Package installs

Run /usr/share/dump1090-fa/generate-wisdom. Wait.

Follow the instructions to copy the resulting wisdom file to /etc/dump1090-fa/wisdom.local.

Restart dump1090.

Manual installs

Run make wisdom.local. Wait.

Copy the resulting wisdom.local file somewhere appropriate.

Update the dump1090-fa command-line options to include --wisdom /path/to/wisdom.local