Clicked the article wondering, does it boil down to "Install PiAware?". Yup, it boils down to "Install PiAware." I mean, at least put a twist on it and build your own half wave antenna or something!
What would impress me would be two SDRs, one monitoring ADS-B and the other tuned to VHF, pulling down the ATC radio transmissions, recognizing the speech, deducing the tail numbers, and then visually associating them with the ADS-B traces on the map. Now that would be impressive! I've had VHF and ADS-B on my roof for the past few years but never got around to doing the speech parsing.
Always room for improvement agreed. I plan on expanding on this further since it is so much easier than previously to get up and running where it took me days to get the container running with everything.
Since I'm in lockdown I have a lot of time on my hands to break out my soldering iron and more hardware. ;)
Yea I didn't mean to come across as debbie downer. Keep going forward with the setup! Do consider experimenting with different antennas. You can probably double or triple your range.
You could also try MLAT with the ATC comms to get a plausibly more deterministic source for the transmissions. I've done a decent amount of work with voice recognition for fire/police and the technology just isn't quite there yet. ATC comms probably have a lot less variation than police/fire calls, so you could probably train some custom models with a bunch of labeled ATC data to get you in the vicinity.
If you knock out any of theses definitely share that as well. I live a hundred miles from Wright Patt and constantly see aircraft that don't show up on any of these sites and don't transmit ADS-B that I'm able to receive.
What would impress me would be two SDRs, one monitoring ADS-B and the other tuned to VHF, pulling down the ATC radio transmissions, recognizing the speech, deducing the tail numbers, and then visually associating them with the ADS-B traces on the map. Now that would be impressive! I've had VHF and ADS-B on my roof for the past few years but never got around to doing the speech parsing.