In a recent Youtube video by Rick Beato he showed all computer and audio recording and playback equipment he has accumulated over the many years he worked as an audio professional. He sang the praises of physical formats and owning music and there are many points that I 100% agree with. He also showed a Blu-Ray Drive and a particular kind of Blu-rays I wasn’t aware of which he is using for long term archival and backup purposes.
Because I know that he is working on macOS I felt somewhat safe to assume that this had to be compatible with macOS and so I immediately went to one of my default computer store websites to check if they had the drive and Blu-rays in stock. They did and it was pretty much the only thing they had on offer.
Why, though?
Ah – good question! For me personally it is about the diversification of backups. Most of my data is stored on HDDs and SSDs, locally or “in the cloud” and there is an appeal to me to physically write essential data, protect it from modification and have it on a different medium with very different volatility properties than a SSD.
Of course, the question would be if there is a Blu-ray reader in 25 years that I could realistically use? Maybe. What the video by Rick Beato showed me that you can hold onto core technology even if it is horrendously outdated. I still have my first computer from 1996 and it is still booting up.
Ultimately I don’t think this is something everyone needs to do. It is a bit of a nerdy playground kind of a deal that is not entirely implausible to have some benefit down the road.
The Gear
The Blu-ray drive is the ASUS BW-16D1X-U and it works out of the box on macOS 26.6.2 without any extra software.
The Blu-ray medium is the Verbatim M Disc – which is a write-once, read-many disc that supposedly has a very long lifetime. Initial claims were 1000+ years.
a) that is hard to verify and b) I’m perfectly fine if they last 50 years which I think is plausible given the fact that I have 20+ years old CD-Rs which are still readable. (Check the wikipedia section on M-Disc durability)
The Software
The good news is that macOS (tested on 26.6.2) comes with everything you need. I was dreading having to install some crappy software just to burn some data on a Blu-ray and there are some reports that burning 100GB discs via the Finder does not work properly but I did everything via the command line / terminal and it worked fine.
drutil (check drive and media status)
hdiutil (create, burn, verify images)
How to
1. Check drive status
Once the drive is connected you can check whether macOS recognizes it. With a blank disc inserted you will also get some media info:
drutil status
Vendor Product Rev
ASUS BW-16D1X-U A105
Type: BD-R Name: /dev/disk10
Write Speeds: 2x, 4x
Overwritable: 10861:54:42 blocks: 48878592 / 100.10GB / 93.23GiB
Space Free: 10861:54:42 blocks: 48878592 / 100.10GB / 93.23GiB
Space Used: 00:00:00 blocks: 0 / 0.00MB / 0.00MiB
Writability: appendable, blank, overwritable
Media ID: VERBAT IMk
You can also check whether hdiutil recognizes the drive via:
hdiutil burn -list
ASUS BW-16D1X-U via USB (DRDeviceSupportLevelUnsupported)
2. Prepare files
Now create a folder and put the files and folders you want to burn onto the disc in that folder. Be aware that you cannot write the full 100GB because of extra metadata that needs to be written alongside your data. From what I could find on the Internet you should aim for 90-95GB max.
3. Create image
When you have compiled the files and folders you can create a burnable image with this command:
Note: the name of the source folder will become the name of the disc.
4. Verify the image and size
This step is optional but is a good moment to verify your image is not exceeding the 90-95GB size limit
hdiutil imageinfo /tmp/my_blu_ray.udf.dmg
Class Name: CRawDiskImage
Size Information:
Total Bytes: 79623483392
Compressed Ratio: 1
Sector Count: 155514616
Total Non-Empty Bytes: 79623483392
Compressed Bytes: 79623483392
Total Empty Bytes: 0
Checksum Type: none
Format: UDTO
partitions:
partition-scheme: none
block-size: 512
appendable: false
partitions:
0:
partition-name: whole disk
partition-start: 0
partition-synthesized: true
partition-length: 155514616
partition-hint: UDF
partition-filesystems:
UDF: Media
burnable: true
Format Description: raw read/write
…
5. Burn and verify the disc
The last step is burning the image to disc which is done with this simple command
hdiutil burn -verifyburn /tmp/my_blu_ray.udf.dmg
Preparing data for burn
Opening session
Opening track
Writing track
.............
And thats it. The verification step failed on the 100GB disc but worked fine on 25GB discs. However the disc was burned fine. There were no IO errors and I could mount the disc and access the data just fine.
If you struggle to eject the disc because Finder or Spotlight are doing things then unmount the disk and eject it via the cli as well:
diskutil unmountDisk force /dev/disk10 (adapt to your system)
drutil tray eject
Final words
So far I’ve managed to burn close to 80GB to disc which indicates that macOS is capable of burning 100GB M-Disc Blu-rays – at least via command line and with this particular drive. The 25GB M-Discs also worked flawlessly with the same method.
The 100Gb took ~2.5h to burn and verify.
If you have any additional tips on tools / commands for burning Blu-rays on macOS, let me know!
Overall I’m quite disappointed with direction computing technology is developing and there seems to be the overarching agenda of making people not own their data nor their computers or other related products. Most recent example would be SmartTVs which have gotten rather cheap because the manufacturers are selling your privacy to ad companies.
All the streaming services make you not own copies of music or movies, they can be changed (ie. remastered or edited) or in the worst case deleted from the cloud.
I am definitely more motivated to own and self host my digital life where feasible. Don’t rely on other peoples / companies computers to keep your photos, documents and other important digital data. Make backups and don’t keep them in just one physical location. I’m planning to have 3-4 Blu-rays with core essential data which I never want to lose and I plan to give a set each to 1-2 close friends – with the most personal stuff obviously password protected/encrypted.
What are your strategies for coping with the IT landscape of the 21st century?
Over the years, I’ve done the odd woodworking project, like building a guitar speaker cabinet or putting some shelves on the wall. I’ve used wood glue before, and I have (had) an ever-growing collection of all kinds of wood screws in my toolbox, mostly leftovers from previous small wood-related tasks. Up until a few months ago, I didn’t have any woodworking power tools, such as a circular saw or a router. I hope that suffices to describe my woodworking skill level, which I would summarize as: Can glue and screw wooden things together that other people have cut to size.
One issue that bothered me with all these previous simple projects was the imperfection resulting from poor measuring and marking, as well as poor planning. I would sometimes work out the dimensions using only a folding rule (“Zollstock”), a pencil, and paper. Other times, I would use a vector drawing tool on my computer. You can find examples of some of my previous projects in these blog posts:
Obviously, I successfully built these things, but I was rarely satisfied with the results. I had to accept the imperfections and sometimes force parts into place to make them fit where they were supposed to go.
Getting inspired by Youtube
A couple of months ago, I wanted to upgrade my IKEA standing desk to something sturdier and with built-in presets. Since I got a nice tabletop for free from a nearby office that was closing down, I only needed a frame. Once the frame arrived, I had to figure out where to drill the holes in the tabletop to mount it properly. For that, I started looking for tutorials on how to drill straight holes into wood, which led me to a German YouTube channel by Jonas Winkler and down the woodworking rabbit hole.
The creator of the YouTube channel is neither your typical nor your traditional carpenter, and he is certainly not your typical German YouTuber. The way he looks and talks is unusual, but for me, that is a welcome contrast to the otherwise rather conventional and often boring German DIY content. On top of that, his humor made me chuckle many times, which is definitely a plus.
To keep this part of the story short, let’s just say that I subsequently managed to drill the holes and mount the tabletop, and I’m now happily typing this blog post at my new desk. Success!
But of course, the YouTube algorithm kept feeding me more videos from this newly discovered channel every day. And … I did the research: I exported my YouTube watch history, processed and searched the data, and found that I watched the first video on 2026-04-14. By 2026-07-16, I had watched … 395 videos from this channel alone, ranging from gear reviews to practical tutorials. Add another 87 videos from the other German channel, Let’s Bastel, and you get an idea of what I mean by “draining” a YouTube channel.
What I got out of this was an understanding of which tools these guys used to realize their projects, as well as which techniques they repeatedly relied on to achieve certain results. For example, I learned how they glued wood together, how they used circular saws, why both preferred plunge saws over conventional handheld circular saws, which tools they used for measuring and marking, and what not to do—both for safety and to avoid wasting money.
After this ingress of new information I had my first project in mind to try out some of the things I’ve learned. I was thinking about doing it like I always do, with pencil and paper or a vector drawing tool … or maybe this would be the perfect time for doing it with a CAD tool?
CAD: First Contact
I knew that CAD tools could be useful for woodworking and that they offered benefits such as technical drawings, exploded views, parts lists, and cut lists, which could in turn be fed into cut-optimization software for plywood sheets.
Long before I chose programming as a profession, I worked as a graphic designer, so I was very familiar with all the usual tools of the trade, such as Photoshop, FreeHand, Illustrator, and so on. However, I had never seriously used any 3D software, and I had never touched a proper CAD program at all.
After a brief search for a beginner-friendly CAD tool, I ended up trying Shapr3D. While it worked well enough for my first project, a Sortimo shelf, I quickly became annoyed by the limitations of the free version. To be fair, Shapr3D is designed to work on an iPad, so the focus is clearly on usability and the user experience on touch devices. I’d say they’ve done a great job in that regard.
I had heard of Onshape before, mostly through Youtube again and the many creators using it like Tom Stanton, rctestflight, Peter Sripol and many more. I created an account and was immediately intimidated as it looked far more complex than Shaper3D but with the help of youtube tutorials and $LLM guidance I quickly recreated my “design”. Compared to Shaper3D, the free version of Onshape lets you import and export, create parts and cut lists and I was able to use one of the cut optimizer websites (Cutlist Evo) to figure out a reasonable sheet size for the plywood which I would order right away.
A week later, the shelf was complete, and it was the most fun I had ever had building something out of wood. I achieved a level of precision I had never managed before, with the largest deviation in the entire assembly being just 0.5 mm. It was bliss to be able to refer back to my technical drawings and their precise measurements whenever needed. It was clear that this was only the beginning.
Sidenote: Yes, I cut the wood in my kitchen with a plunge saw. With the vacuum cleaner attached, I had minimal saw dust to deal with.
The next project: Polychrome
A few weeks after my first successful conversion from CAD to reality, another project snuck up on me when my partner mentioned something she was working on: some kind of light installation for a festival with an interactive element. The interaction was facilitated by tiny radar sensors that were meant to hang 5 m above the ground from six arms, each 3 m long and angled upwards at precisely 15°. The team was unsure how to build this out of wood using simple tools, as the budget was somewhat limited. Additionally, it needed to be stable and weatherproof enough to withstand wind and rain. The installation would also eventually undergo some form of safety inspection.
Fortunately, I had a long train ride coming up, and during the first six-hour leg, I decided to load up Onshape and try to come up with a design that could work. I had already learned a bunch of things the last time around, but I still had to learn a whole lot more, especially how to keep the design and its parts flexible, since the final dimensions would have to be determined later based on the available wood.
Again, $LLM was extremely helpful in explaining Onshape’s features and how to use them. Without it, I wouldn’t have been able to complete the first draft in six hours. This time, I designed each part separately, added custom mate connectors, and created subassemblies before putting everything together in the final assembly.
Click this link to view the CAD model yourself without an account. With an account you can copy and modify it. Just to be clear, I have no affiliation with Onshape – I just really enjoy this tool.
7 Days to make it real
A few weeks later, it was time to meet up and shop for some wood. Fortunately, we found a round disc with the perfect proportions, originally intended as a tabletop. Suitable wood for the arms followed shortly afterwards.
The mast was going to be provided by the festival, although its exact dimensions were not yet known. At that point, we also still had no clear idea what kind of wood to use for the wedges. I had a bunch of tools, but nothing that could cut them easily. Luckily, the festival had a dedicated woodworking crew with a modest workshop setup, including a proper table saw and miter saw. We therefore postponed choosing the wood for the wedges until we had spoken to them. If they lacked the appropriate tools, we would have to construct the wedges from several thinner layers instead.
Two weeks before the actual event, I packed up most of my tools and hauled them to the site. I was relieved to learn that the festival’s woodworking crew would indeed be able to cut the wedges to my specifications, and they were delighted when I handed them a technical drawing containing all the relevant measurements.
Sadly, I was unable to stick around and watch them make the cuts, but I assume they used their table saw with some kind of jig. Since my plunge saw can only cut about 5 cm deep with the guide rail attached, cutting the wedges to specification would have been quite a project in itself.
Similarly, we were quite lucky to find a tabletop with almost exactly the same dimensions as the one I had used in the CAD design. Otherwise, I would either have made a hexagonal “crown” base plate from thick plywood or attempted to cut a perfect circle with my router.
Especially during the early phase of gathering materials and filling in the unknowns about where and how we would obtain certain parts, it was incredibly useful that I had put in the time in CAD to make all the parts connect at the correct pivot or center points. This allowed us to quickly adjust the dimensions of individual parts without having to reassemble the entire design. Here is a quick demo video showing exactly that:
After three days on site and a few trips to the local “Baumarkt” ie. the home improvement store, we had all the parts and tools needed for the actual assembly. The one thing still missing was a wood drill bit long enough to drill through the entire base–wedge–arm–wedge assembly, so I could be sure that the metal bolts would pass through all of it smoothly.
The bolts, nuts, washers, and fasteners were only bought once we were certain of the final dimensions. Although I had planned to use M8 bolts from the start, the exact bolt length and the types of washers and fasteners we would need remained undecided until quite late in the process.
The decision to add a top wedge also came quite late. Initially, I thought the bolts, nuts, and washers would work fine even without parallel surfaces to bear against. However, once we had the wedges and I tried clamping everything together, it became apparent how useful those parallel surfaces would be.
I went back to the on-site wood workshop and asked for a few more wedges, which they cut that same day. Finally, everything was ready for the preassembly of the arms, wedges, and base plate. I had to mark and number each arm and then do my best to drill straight holes through the entire clamped-together assembly. Getting everything into place, measuring, aligning, and clamping it took up most of the time on this project, but it was worth it.
End of arm is getting support braces glued to itEnd of arm is getting support braces glued to itTest assembly on base plate after drilling holesTest assembly on base plate after drilling holesFinished arms with sensor and cable assemblyTop close up of final assemblyFinal assembly bottom view with bracesArm assembly in progressFull assembly with platform and light panels in the background
As you can see in the pictures, the mast was slightly crooked so we had to adjust one of the heavy duty braces to make it as straight as we could. We pre-assembled as much as we could the night before because our allotted time with the crane was limited. In the end the actual assembly went quite smooth. We first mounted the base plate with a center screw on top of the mast. Then we added the heavy duty braces which made the connection between mast and base plate very stable. Lastly we mounted the arms one by one and drilled a hole to get the cables down to the platform.
In the end, I was super happy that my initial idea worked in reality. I’m glad I decided to build it in CAD first, as this allowed me to experiment with the dimensions of the individual parts and obtain precise measurements for the actual build.
Last but not least, I’m very thankful for all the content on Jonas Winkler’s YouTube channel. I bought many of my new tools based on his videos, and almost every tool I brought to the site proved useful in one way or another. An additional thank-you goes to Michael Truppe and his YouTube channel, “Lets-Bastel” which provided further context, inspiration, and motivation.
I hope there will be a new challenge like this in the not too distant future! I had a blast!
Appendix A: The Gear List
As if this post wasn’t long enough already … but some of you will ask about the tools I have used so here is a list of everything I used for this project and the shelf project that worked well, that I would buy again, and that I can recommend. I have no affiliation with any of the mentioned brands and shops. (A notable alternative to Dictum or at least with a complimenting catalogue is https://www.feinewerkzeuge.de)
For clamps there are two major brands that you can basically get any clamp type from. I’ve started using Piher (Spain) clamps and I’ve been very happy with them. There is another reputable brand called Bessey (Germany) which I’d also recommend.
As you can see, I am a Makita enjoyer. Every Makita tool listed here, I’d buy again. Some people will say tools from $Otherbrand are so much better but I would say that in each tool category, Makita has good and very good options. It is usually the cheapest/lowest tier which are the ones that aren’t that good.
Stating the obvious: Once you’ve decided on a battery eco system it is more convenient to stay there. Plus Makita is one of 3 or 4 independent power tool companies which i sympathize with (see this info graphic). That being said – other people may choose different eco systems and thats ok too.
All links are to German stores and websites. But you should be able to find them on english websites with the provided model names.
This one deserves its own section. All the tools are almost useless if you don’t have a proper work surface and since I don’t own a house with a proper workshop and I want to be able to do projects where mobility is a decisive factor, I was looking for a mobile work bench. At first I was considering something like the Metabo MWB 100 but it seemed too heavy and bulky for stowing it away in my apartment. Then I stumbled across the Bora Centipede and eventually bought it.
This is one of the best purchases ever. It is so easy to move around, stow away and to set up. It is so incredibly solid once assembled. I can’t say enough good things about this thing. Of all the things this would be maybe my top recommendation if you’re looking for a portable yet stable temporary work surface.
Appendix B: How to find the exact center of a circle
For this project it was necessary to have equal spacing between all 6 arms. The math is quite simple: 360º / 6 = 60º and there is a neat little trick to divide a circle into 6 equal parts by tracing the radius along the edge and then connecting all intersections with the circle like so:
At small scales this works remarkably well and the slight imperfections don’t really add up to much. The center looks like a perfect center point. However using this technique on a 60cm diameter disk with rounded edges led to somewhat catastrophic results when attempting to determine the true center of the disc. Basically I ended up with a rather large triangle instead of a center point. With this technique, measuring errors compound quickly.
The method that I’ve used to precisely find the middle is as follows:
After my recent post I did not stop tinkering and exploring. To my own surprise it didn’t take long to come across significant improvements to my toolchain.
Someone contacted me on mastodon shortly after and said that a friend of his had also recently gotten into SDRs and ADS-B and decided to write his on demodulator called stream1090. While this is actively in development and still early stages, this part from the README resonated with me.
“Most implementations look for the so-called preamble (a sequence of pulses anounncing a message). Stream1090 skips this step and maintains directly a set of shift registers. Based on the CRC sum and other criteria, messages are being identified. The hope is that in high traffic situations, a higher overall message rate can be achieved compared to a preamble based approach.”
Being only a demodulator means that the emitted data needs further processing. Additionally, this tool does not directly talk to your SDR, which makes the resulting pipeline seem a bit more complex at first — but it’s not as bad as it looks.
In my last post the toolchain consisted of two tools
readsb (read from SDR, demodulate, decode, write stats)
tar1090 (read stats, render map)
With the new toolchain I’m streaming demodulated data into readsb. For this to work, the readsb command has two additional flags for specifying the port on which to stream data into and another port for some graphs (more on that later).
Now it’s time to stream some data into readsb. As with most of these tools, none of them consider macOS as a target platform but luckily for me, I could compile all of them successfully albeit with some tinkering. In this case compilation was pretty effortless and I just followed the instructions from the README.
After that I started readsb with the command above and then used this command to get the data from the SDR, pipe it into stream1090 and then into readsb via socat.
The rendering setup thus far isn’t bad. Essentially I just started a python web server for tar1090 to render a nice map. However, I wanted more longterm statistics of my experiments and searched for some kind of graphing solution.
Compared to the other tools so far, this one is not as nice to install as it as a bunch of dependencies that I don’t want to install on my main workstation. Among them are classics like rrdtool, gnuplot and coreutils – with the first two having many more dependencies.
Docker / Apple Container / OCI solution
I was wondering if there might be a Docker image that I could use instead and if there wasn’t I’d rather make one myself to contain this zoo of dependencies.
Again luckily for me, there are (at least) two suitable docker images.
Both of these bundle a lot of ADS-B processing tools at the price of shoehorning all those config parameters of the various tools into the Docker domain.
I’ve started with the first image which I got running using Apple Containers
With the the two previous commands already running I could then point my browser to localhost:8080 to see my familiar tar1090 map.
Additionally I got a barely visible link to some stats which you can make permanent between machine / container restarts with the --volume flag.
While the second image (ultrafeeder) looks even more complete and feature rich, I’ll stick with the first image for the time being.
Further enhancements
As you can see, my reception range has increased quite a bit. I noticed a slight improvement when switching to stream1090 and then I moved my little dipole telescope kit antenna as close to the window as possible.
Later this week I will receive a combined Low Noise Amplifier (LNA) and Filter specifically for ADS-B. I will add another post if that yields signficant reception improvements.
For a while I was somewhat interested in playing around with a Software Defined Radio (SDR). Recently I bought myself an entry level SDR and started exploring.
One of the first things I was interested in was receiving and tracking ADS-B data. This is a specific radio transmission used by aircraft to broadcast positional data, among other things. This is what sites like flightradar24 are based on. Most information that is displayed there is based on ADS-B data received by probably thousands of individual receivers around the globe.
The SDR I bought was the ubiquitous RTL-SDR Blog v4 with a basic antenna kit which cost me 99€.
I am a total beginner when it comes to radio and specifically software defined radios apart from very general knowledge of how electro magnetic signals work. Therefore I had to do quite a lot of research before I received and decoded the first actual ADS-B message.
Question number one: What kind of antenna is needed to receive ADS-B?
The frequency that is being used can be easily looked up. It’s on 1090Mhz. But what is somewhat harder to find out is the optimal length and orientation of the antenna.
The kit which I bought contains a simple dipole antenna base with two different pairs of metal telescopic antennas. After a bit of googling I found out that there is a formula for calculating the optimal length of a dipole antenna for a given center frequency. Then I looked up a basic Dipole Calculator like this one: https://www.wireantennas.co.uk/dipole-calculator
I ended up with 13.086cm of total length for the dipole. Then I screwed on the two short telescopic antennas to the dipole base, connected everything and started SDR++ to have a look.
Unfortunately there wasn’t much to see but I also recognized the many options to configure your SDR in the software and that I barely knew what any of them meant or related to. So the search continued for “ads-b sdr settings” and the like. Eventually I found some youtube videos that had the crucial information:
ADS-B is vertically polarized which means that the antenna should be oriented vertically and switching SDR++ to “RAW” would prevent it from trying to “interpret” the signal since it’s digital in nature anyway.
(Bonus Tip: Also try both possible vertical orientations since one arm of the dipole is connected to ground / the shield and the other arm to the conductor – some people claim that the orientation can make a difference but I can’t neither confirm nor deny from my limited tests)
Unsure of whether this would work from within my apartment in the middle of the city, I started up SDR++, tuned it to 1090Mhz with autogain enabled and the antenna mounted to a photo tripod, I moved around to see if I could catch any signals. Eventually I found a spot where these patterns appeared.
Then I sat down the tripod and watched the signal come in.
How to decode and visualize the data?
Now that I was somewhat sure that I actually receive ADS-B data, I wondered how I could best decode and visualize it, ideally on my mac without much hassle. If you’re on Linux most of the steps are much simpler and sometimes even available as package.
I’ll spare you the details of my research which lasted several days and took me down various rabbit holes. At first I found a tool called dump1090 which you can even install via homebrew. There are many forks and permutations of this tool and long story short I’m currently using a toolchain which is very similar to websites like https://adsb.lol
Building this on macOS was not super straight forward but with a little bit of LLM help decoding the compiler errors I got both to work.
For readsb I had to edit the Makefile and remove all mentions of Werror which didn’t work for some reason.
git clone https://github.com/wiedehopf/readsb.git
cd readsb
perl -pi -e 's/(^|\s)-Werror(\s|$)/ /g' Makefile
make RTLSDR=yes CPPFLAGS="-I/opt/homebrew/include" LDFLAGS="-L/opt/homebrew/lib"
That compiled successfully on my M4 mac running macOS 26.2 (Tahoe). You might need to install some dependencies via homebrew like librtlsdr. Check the project repo for the required packages.
After the compile worked, I could start readsb like this
mkdir -p ~/src/adsb/json
[~/src/readsb:dev*] ./readsb \
--device-type rtlsdr \
--lat 52.5200 --lon 13.4050 \
--write-json ~/src/adsb/json \
--write-json-every 1 \
--db-file "$HOME/src/readsb/aircraft.csv.gz" \ (more on this flag in a bit)
--net
Now you should see output in the terminal as well as in the json directory. All we need to do now is to render it with the tar1090 tool.
git clone https://github.com/wiedehopf/tar1090.git
cd tar1090
ln -s ~/src/adsb/json data
python3 -m http.server 8080
This should allow you to open your browser and point it to localhost on port 8080. You should see something like this.
This screenshot was made after leaving both tools running for a while and receiving a bunch of ADS-B data. The blue outline indicates from where I was able to receive data by correlating the messages from the aircrafts with their reported longitude and latitude.
Now the --db-file flag for the readsb tool allows you to match airplane registration codes with airplane models so if you want to see the airplane type you need to download the most recent db file from here:
Lastly you can edit the html/config.js file in the tar1090 folder and uncomment/set these 3 options:
// get flight route from routeApi service default setting (toggle via settings checkbox)
useRouteAPI = true;
// configure route display, possible values: iata, icao, city (can use multiple like this: iata+city)
routeDisplay = 'iata';
// which routeApi service to use
// routeApiUrl = "https://adsb.im/api/0/routeset";
routeApiUrl = "https://api.adsb.lol/api/0/routeset";
// routeApiUrl = ""; // to disable route API so it can't be enabled by a website visitor
Note that you might get API rate limited if you live in a busy area with many flights that need to be resolved for their route data.
But that is essentially it. You can see that from within my apartment I’m able to see a bunch of flights with no clear view to the horizon or the sky. Even some aircraft which were north of me. My apartment faces south and so is my antenna but I suspect the houses across the street might reflect some of the signals from the north back to me.
I also had the antenna out once and I could receive signals from A LOT further but for now I’m happy. I might try different antennas or maybe a filter + low noise amplifier specifically tuned for ADS-B but that is not needed to get going.
Put any questions or suggestions in the comments below. I hope this writeup saved some people with a similar beginner knowledge a lot of time.
I’ll be escaping the grey, dark, cold and wet Berlin for a month. Last year I did the same and I wanted to be able to record a Glitterbrains podcast , record guitar and actually take guitar lessons remotely.
Back then I brought my UA Apollo Twin with me so I could do some flexible audio routing including the fabled mix-minus (n-1) setup and also a Beyerdynamic headset.
Last year I’ve sold my Universal Audio interfaces and switched to an RME interface instead which is far superior when it comes to routing flexibility and software support.
So for this year’s workation, I needed a new mobile audio interface that allowed for flexible routing and so I bought the RME Babyface Pro FS. The investment hurt a little but it’s just so convenient to stay in the same eco system, carry over my TotalMix settings and rely on the great RME engineering. (I also think there is hardly a better audio interface for Podcasting / Streaming than the RME ones)
So without further ado, here is my mobile podcasting, guitar recording and guitar lesson setup:
I could definitely save some weight and space by using a headset again but there isn’t currently a model that I feel like investing money in. Therefore I went with a slightly more involved but also more flexible setup. Looking forward to try it out.
