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Feeding Plane.watch

If you wish to feed Plane.watch, follow the steps below.

Plane.watch is the end product of a Wouldn't it be cool if? statement. It is an ADS-B aggregation project by members of SDR-Enthusiasts. It is currently completely non-commercial, run by members of the community as a passion project, and backed by an Australian-based Not-for-Profit association.

The docker image ghcr.io/plane-watch/docker-plane-watch contains the plane.watch feeder software and all of its required prerequisites and libraries. This needs to run in conjunction with ultrafeeder (or another Beast provider).

plane.watch Feeder Registration

Register for a plane.watch feeder account

Head over to https://atc.plane.watch and sign up for an account.

Create your feeder

Login to https://atc.plane.watch, click on Feeders, + New Feeder. Fill out your details.

When you save your feeder, an API Key will be generated. Take note of this, as it will be required below.

Update .env file

Inside your application directory (/opt/adsb), edit the .env file using your favourite text editor. Beginners may find the editor nano easy to use:

nano /opt/adsb/.env

This file holds all of the commonly used variables (such as our latitude, longitude and altitude). We're going to add our plane.watch variables to this file. Add the following lines to the file:

PLANEWATCH_KEY=YOURAPIKEY

  • Replace YOURAPIKEY with the API KEY that was provided the previous step.

For example:

PLANEWATCH_KEY=4e8413e6-52eb-11ea-8681-1c1b0d925d3g

Deploying plane.watch feeder

Open the docker-compose.yml file that was created when deploying ultrafeeder.

Append the following lines to the end of the file (inside the services: section):

  planewatch:
    image: ghcr.io/plane-watch/docker-plane-watch:latest
    container_name: planewatch
    restart: unless-stopped
    environment:
      - BEASTHOST=ultrafeeder
      - LAT=${FEEDER_LAT}
      - LONG=${FEEDER_LONG}
      - ALT=${FEEDER_ALT_M}m
      - TZ=${FEEDER_TZ}
      - API_KEY=${PLANEWATCH_KEY}
    tmpfs:
      - /run:exec,size=64M
      - /var/log

To explain what's going on in this addition:

  • We're creating a container called planewatch, from the image ghcr.io/plane-watch/docker-plane-watch:latest.

  • We're passing several environment variables to the container:

    • BEASTHOST=ultrafeeder to inform the feeder to get its ADSB data from the container ultrafeeder over our private adsbnet network.

    • LAT will use the FEEDER_LAT variable from your .env file.

    • LONG will use the FEEDER_LONG variable from your .env file.

    • ALT will use the FEEDER_ALT_M variable from your .env file.

    • TZ will use the FEEDER_TZ variable from your .env file.

    • API_KEY will use the PLANEWATCH_KEY variable from your .env file.

  • We're using tmpfs for volumes that have regular I/O. Any files stored in a tmpfs mount are temporarily stored outside the container's writable layer. This helps to reduce:

    • The size of the container, by not writing changes to the underlying container; and

    • SD Card or SSD wear

Once the file has been updated, issue the command docker compose up -d in the application directory to apply the changes and bring up the planewatch container. You should see the following output:

 ✔ Container ultrafeeder  Running
 ✔ Container planewatch   Started

You can see from the output above that the ultrafeeder container was left alone (as the configuration for this container did not change), and a new container planewatch was created.

We can view the logs for the environment with the command docker compose logs, or continually "tail" them with docker compose logs -f. We should now see logs from our newly created planewatch container:

[s6-init] making user provided files available at /var/run/s6/etc...exited 0.
[s6-init] ensuring user provided files have correct perms...exited 0.
[fix-attrs.d] applying ownership & permissions fixes...
[fix-attrs.d] done.
[cont-init.d] executing container initialization scripts...
[cont-init.d] 01-timezone: executing...
[cont-init.d] 01-timezone: exited 0.
[cont-init.d] 02-sanity_check: executing...
[cont-init.d] 02-sanity_check: exited 0.
[cont-init.d] done.
[services.d] starting services
2023-05-27T09:09:49+08:00 INF plane.watch feeder started version=20230526
2023-05-27T09:09:49+08:00 INF listening for incoming connections dst=feed.push.plane.watch:12346 listen=127.0.0.1:12346 proto=MLAT
2023-05-27T09:09:49+08:00 INF starting tunnel dst=feed.push.plane.watch:12345 proto=BEAST src=readsb:30005
[services.d] done.
2023-05-27T09:09:49+08:00 INF connection established dst=feed.push.plane.watch:12345 proto=BEAST src=readsb:30005
[mlat-client] Sat May 27 09:09:54 2023 mlat-client 0.2.11 starting up
[mlat-client] Sat May 27 09:09:54 2023 Listening for Beast-format results connection on port 30105
2023-05-27T09:09:54+08:00 INF connection established dst=feed.push.plane.watch:12346 listen=127.0.0.1:12346 proto=MLAT src=127.0.0.1:35492
[mlat-client] Sat May 27 09:09:54 2023 Connected to multilateration server at 127.0.0.1:12346, handshaking
[mlat-client] Sat May 27 09:09:59 2023 Server says:
[mlat-client] Sat May 27 09:09:59 2023 Handshake complete.
[mlat-client] Sat May 27 09:09:59 2023   Compression:       zlib2
[mlat-client] Sat May 27 09:09:59 2023   UDP transport:     disabled
[mlat-client] Sat May 27 09:09:59 2023   Split sync:        disabled
[mlat-client] Sat May 27 09:09:59 2023 Input connected to readsb:30005
[mlat-client] Sat May 27 09:09:59 2023 Input format changed to BEAST, 12MHz clock
2023-05-27T09:14:49+08:00 INF statistics bytesRxLocal=247548 bytesRxRemote=0 bytesTxLocal=0 bytesTxRemote=247548 proto=BEAST
2023-05-27T09:14:49+08:00 INF statistics bytesRxLocal=38354 bytesRxRemote=785 bytesTxLocal=785 bytesTxRemote=38354 proto=MLAT

After a few minutes, browse to https://atc.plane.watch/. Your feeder should be listed as "online". It can take up to 10 minutes for the status to update.

Advanced

If you want to look at more options and examples for the plane.watch container, you can find the repository here.

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