We built the smallest dual-band aircraft tracker
Details
- External ID
- 49455557
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- We built the smallest dual-band aircraft tracker
- Website domain
- pantsforbirds.com
- Launched
- Aug. 26, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 95
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.9233870967741935
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 10, 2026, 5:32 a.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 10, 2026, 5:32 a.m.
Description
We've been building open source embedded ADS-B receivers for a while, and spent the past 8 months smallifying our existing receiver tech with a new chip from Semtech. Ask me anything about ADSB or hardware manufacturing!
Enrichment
- Theme
- autonomous robotics, drones, and sensor hardware
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Hardware & robotics
- Audience
- Prosumer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Commercial product
- Normalized one-liner
- compact dual-band aircraft tracker
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
No Building physical dual-band ADS-B receiver hardware requires RF circuit board design, antenna engineering, embedded firmware, and manufacturing logistics.
What it would actually take: Requires an electrical engineering workflow involving RF schematic and PCB layout (KiCad/Altium), impedance matching, and filtering for 978 MHz and 1090 MHz. The firmware involves low-level DSP or interfacing with specialized RF receiver chips (e.g. Semtech) to decode ADS-B pulses on microcontrollers (like ESP32 or STM32), followed by physical component sourcing, SMT assembly, and RF testing.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Stratux (ADS-B in / TCAS alternative for small planes), RTL-SDR receivers, dump1090 (ADS-B decoder), dump978 (UAT decoder), ADS-B.lol / Airloom (3D flight tracker)
Concerns raised: RF components CC1314 and LR2021 operating outside spec at 1.090GHz, LR2021 quirks limiting packet types (Mode S DF17 only, no squitter packets), Power consumption tradeoffs with fewer CPU cycles vs ADSBee 1090
Feature requests: 3D bounding box filtering with height parameter for aircraft detection, Lower cost m1421-based receiver as drop-in Stratux replacement, Automated aircraft noise reporting integration for airport influence areas
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 48 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #8 of 49 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 298 days after the earliest competitor.
- ADSBee, an open source dual band embedded ADS-B receiver for anything · hn · 2026-01-01 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.64
- F32 · hn · 2025-11-19 · 302 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- EEGFrontier · hn · 2026-02-28 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- VolAnti · hn · 2026-09-09 · 16 upvotes · similarity 0.40
- I built an Open Source screen timer for the m5stickc (Arduino) · hn · 2026-01-06 · 17 upvotes · similarity 0.39
- DroneTector: high-resolution radars to detect small drones · yc · 2026-02-19 · 10 upvotes · similarity 0.38
- I built an encrypted BLE dongle for pasting stuff to air-gapped devices · hn · 2026-07-04 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.38
- I designed my own 3D printer motherboard · hn · 2025-12-06 · 127 upvotes · similarity 0.37
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a hardware & robotics tool for Fintech yet.