[Xastir] Planes and Ships

[Curt Mills]

FYI: There have been massive strides made in both the plane script (ads-b.pl)
and the ship script (ais.pl) in the last several weeks. Both scripts now
show the country of registration in parenthesis after the ID (or after the
vessel name/flight number/tail number). It's nice to watch the map and see
a boat from Panama or China zipping by on Puget Sound below me, or a plane
overhead from Iceland.

These can be received via an RTL SDR (USB dongle) which can be had for
around $10 to $25. If you want to receive both planes and boats, get 2. If
you want to receive planes on the 2nd frequency, get a third. As usual for
anything RF, a better antenna and better antenna placement gets you far.

Also: Check out the headers of the scripts for how to run them. Also note
that there were big strides made in the receive capability of the plane
software by switching to a different fork of the software and running
different command options. Big improvements!

On the lighter side, n7ipb sent me this today:  http://xkcd.com/1660/

-- 
Curt, WE7U
http://wetnet.net/~we7u
http://www.sarguydigital.com