Aircraft are everywhere. Knowing exactly where is paramount as it’s considered bad form for two aircraft to be in the same place at the same time. To avoid this, aircraft worldwide constantly and publicly broadcast their location, heading, and all sorts of other data using a system called ADS-B or Automatic Dependent Surveillance Broadcast.

This data is a natural fit for an event stream. After all, it’s a constant stream of data that is literally being broadcast in real-time. But how can we capture these broadcasts and the data within? Surely it must require expensive hardware and special tools!

Not so much. It turns out that we can capture ADS-B data easily using a combination of a cheap radio dongle and free software—a combination called software-defined radio. From there we can store it in an event stream and consume, transform, and publish it at our leisure. Cool, right?

In this session, you’ll learn how software-defined radio works (and not just for ADB-S), how to receive and store ADS-B data in event streams, and how to use those streams to build a map showing real-time flight data using Node.js, Redis Streams, and whatever front-end JavaScript framework happens to be popular that day!