Setting Up a Receiver With the airplanes.live Image

Summary: Flashing the ready-made SD card image, getting it on your wifi, setting the antenna position, and checking it is feeding.

If you have a Raspberry Pi and an SDR, the quickest route is the SD card image airplanes.live publish: it boots with the decoder, the feed client and a setup page already on it.

1. Write the Image to a Card

• Download the current image from downloads.airplanes.live (the full image is the one to take; check the dates and take the newest).
• Write it with Raspberry Pi Imager: under Choose OS pick Use custom and select the file you downloaded.

2. First Boot

The first boot expands the filesystem to fill the card and can take several minutes with nothing much to see. After that it starts in well under a minute.

3. Get It on Your Wifi

• A wired connection needs nothing at all — plug it in and skip to the next step.
• For wifi, the Pi puts out its own airplanes-config network for the first 15 minutes. Join it from a phone or laptop, open http://airplanes.local, choose WiFi Setup and enter your network details. It reboots onto your network.

4. Set the Antenna Position

Open http://airplanes.local again and choose Configure receiver / Location. Set the latitude and longitude of the antenna (not the house, and not the middle of the town), the altitude above mean sea level, and a name for your feeder.

This is the step worth being fussy about: MLAT compares arrival times in fractions of a microsecond, so a position that is out by a hundred metres makes your receiver worse than useless for it. A mapping tool that reports ground elevation, then adding the height of the antenna above the ground, gets you close enough.

5. Check It Is Feeding

• The status page at http://airplanes.local shows what the receiver is decoding.
• Your feed shows up at airplanes.live/myfeed a few minutes after data starts arriving, ADS-B first and MLAT shortly after.
• Then look at the UKAFG map: aircraft your receiver is the only one hearing will be there.

Before You Leave It Running

The image ships with a default login (username pi). Change that password if the Pi is reachable from anywhere but your own network, and give it a fixed address on your router so you can find it again.

Their full walk-through, with screenshots, is at airplanes.live/image-guide.

UKAFG is not affiliated with airplanes.live. This section is a plain-English walk-through for members who want to help; their own guides at airplanes.live/get-started are the authority, and worth checking, as commands, images and hardware move on.