Support
What a site needs.
A screen, a small PC and a network. Longer if you are putting an aerial on the roof, which is the part worth doing properly.
Install
A Windows machine, ten minutes.
Unzip it
Two folders come out. App is the program and is replaced entirely when you update. Data is yours: settings, artwork, sighting history. An update never touches it.
Start it
Double-click Airborne.bat. Your browser opens on its own. The one prerequisite is Node.js, installed once from nodejs.org. Next, next, finish.
Point it somewhere
Point it at the location the screen should watch: your apron, your circuit, an airport a customer is inbound from. It keeps working offline once it is running.
No spare PC? A small fanless mini PC is the usual answer, an Intel N100 box or a second-hand NUC: quiet, low power, and small enough to sit behind the screen or hang off its back bracket.
Data
Where the aircraft come from.
| Setting | What it is | Needs |
|---|---|---|
| reapi | adsb.lol, for units that feed it back. The setting a sold unit runs on. | Your own receiver |
| adsblol | The same data from the public endpoint. Slower, rate limited, and what the unit falls back to on its own. | Nothing |
| tar1090 | Your own receiver, directly. No third party, no rate limit, and it works with the broadband unplugged. | readsb or dump1090 |
| mock | Simulated traffic, for setting the thing up on a kitchen table with no aerial. | Nothing |
A receiver is an RTL-SDR dongle and a 1090 MHz aerial in a loft or an upstairs window, plugged into the machine running Airborne. Height matters more than anything else: a small aerial upstairs will reach a hundred kilometres. We are also placing a small number of receivers where coverage is thin.
Television
Putting it on the screen.
One machine, one screen. Plug the PC running Airborne into the television or monitor it will live on, open the browser it starts for you, and press F11 for full screen. That is the whole arrangement.
Set the browser to open Airborne on start-up and the machine to sign in on its own, and a power cut is survivable without anybody fetching a keyboard.
If the screen is a television rather than a monitor, check its overscan setting first: some sets crop the edges of a computer picture by default and take the top line of the display with it.
Questions
The ones we are asked.
- What does it run on?
- Windows today, on a machine you provide. The player being built for people who do not want to provide one is a Raspberry Pi, which is where the shipped hardware is going. The stack underneath is ordinary Node.js, so other machines can run it, but we will only sell what we have tested.
- Does it need my own aerial?
- No, but it is better with one. Without a receiver it reads a shared community feed, which is slower, rate limited and dependent on volunteers. With one, the data arrives off the air in real time and nothing outside your house is involved.
- What happens when the internet goes down?
- With your own receiver, nothing. Aircraft, registrations, types and routes are all resolved on the unit from data that ships with it. Without a receiver the display holds the last good reading and says how old it is, rather than going blank.
- Why is there no aeroplane for some aircraft?
- Because we do not have artwork for that operator and type, and we would rather show nothing than paint an aircraft in another airline's colours. The frame stays empty and the text carries it. Tell us what you keep seeing and it moves up the list.
- Can I watch somewhere other than my house?
- Yes. Put the marker anywhere. The display follows that circle instead, and everything else works the same.
- Does it send anything back?
- The application checks your key when it starts and asks for updates. It does not send your position, your sighting history or anything about what you have seen. That database lives in your Data folder and stays there.
- Can one machine drive several screens?
- One installation drives one screen. A site with several screens runs several, each able to watch somewhere different.
- What will it cost?
- Pricing is not settled, so there is nothing honest to say about it yet. What we can promise is that if we ever shut down, the licence cost comes off and the last build is published able to read whatever ADS-B source you point it at. Nothing on a wall stops working.
Still stuck?
Write to rob@whatsairborne.com. Include the output of /api/diagnose from the machine running it, which tests every data source and reports what the licence position is, and the answer usually comes back the same day.
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