We built the smallest dual-band aircraft tracker
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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!
HN · launched Aug 26, 2026 · 95 upvotes (top 8%) · 0 views
Niche: open-source hardware and maker electronics · 181 launches, 4 in the last 7 days ▼ -64% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Hardware & robotics
- Prosumer
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 181 launches in open-source hardware and maker electronics →
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 : 98 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #14 of 99 (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 0.44
- VolAnti · hn · 2026-09-09 · 16 upvotes · similarity 0.41
- adsbrx · github · 2026-10-16 · 12 upvotes · similarity 0.41
- OP-XY-MNMD · github · 2026-10-27 · 12 upvotes · similarity 0.40
- I built an Open Source screen timer for the m5stickc (Arduino) · hn · 2026-01-06 · 17 upvotes · similarity 0.40
- DroneTector: high-resolution radars to detect small drones · yc · 2026-02-19 · 10 upvotes · similarity 0.40
The niche, labels, vibe code rating and competitor comparison on this page are analysis by Nicheloom. If you use them, please credit nicheloom.com. How you may use our data.