Announcing "PiSkyTracker"

Andrew Johnson has put together this brilliant kit for monitoring air traffic, specifically in relation to the Chemtrail phenomenon. Well worth a look. Here are the details pasted from his YouTube page and the video above gives a demonstration of its effectiveness.

This is to announce the availability of a "kit" to enable people to track and log aircraft flying over their location using a fairly cheap combination of electronics.
Contact ad.johnson@ntlworld.com or go through http://www.checktheevidence.com/

To make effective use of the kit, you will need a PC or Mac for initial set up and an internet connection to make best use of the main features. Following initial set-up, the kit can run autonomously using only a little electricity.
It will work anywhere in the world -- you just need the correct power supply for your country.

Background
For some years now, it has been possible to track aircraft flying over your location using such devices as the AirNav Radarbox and the SBS-1, but these have been quite expensive -- costing as much or more than a Laptop PC, which is needed to view the results.

Also online, sites such as www.FlightRadar24.com, Flight Aware and Virtual Radar offer tracking and aircraft identification features, though can be slow to update and somewhat cumbersome to use. Similarly, there are Android and iPhone Apps which interface to these online services and allow you, for example, to identify flights by holding up your phone in the direction of a plane in the sky. Of course, not everyone has an iPhone or Android phone...

The hardware solutions, like the AirNav box, allow flights to be logged but their logging features are not very flexible. For example, with the AirNav box (2010 version of the software), all the messages received and decoded by the box can be saved to log files -- but in a day, 600,000 messages may be received from all the aircraft that are detected, resulting in large log files, which need to be processed by special software to extract useful information. Additionally, for continuous 24/7 logging, things like the AirNav box "tie up" a PC or laptop which may be needed for other uses.

The Website and Phone App solutions don't have logging features of any great sophistication, so there is something needed to allow this logging and counting of aircraft automatically.
This is where PiSkytracker comes in to the picture.
Main Features
• Automatic Logging of Flights and Flight statistics
• Camera Support to Photograph The Sky every Few minutes
• Automatic Capture of Weather Data
• Comprehensive Plane Charting

Charting parameters can be set so that planes within a certain range are drawn on charts which are created every few minutes or every hour. Charting can be set so that only planes above a certain altitude are tracked on the chart. This therefore logs the paths of aircraft over your location (which is shown in the centre of the chart).
• Spoken Flight Announcements
• Data saved in Standard Formats

All this data is saved on a standard SD Card in formats which can be easily read and How does it Work?

The whole system relies on the fact that many aircraft are now transmitting ADS-B (Automatic Dependent Surveillance -- Broadcast) messages when in flight. These messages contain the following information
• A code number identifying the aircraft
• Flight Number
• Altitude
• Position (Latitude/Longitude)
• Speed
• Heading

(This page has a good explanation: http://planefinder.net/about/ads-b-how-planefinder-works/) The tracker simply receives and decodes these messages -- then software can be used to process the messages in any way desired. For example, you can count the number of aircraft which are detected in a given period, within a certain range and above a certain altitude or between certain altitudes.

If you are interested in getting hold of a kit, let me know. I will also be posting additional information soon. I have more or less finalised the software development, but may tweak a few things. Feedback, comments, ideas welcome!

http://www.checktheevidence.com/pdf/Announcing%20PiSkyTracker.pdf