I’m pleased to present the following high level summary of progress made by engineering and operations staff at Pants for Birds LLC in the month of April. In fewer words, here’s what I’ve been up to this month!
🤖 ADSBee will be at Open Sauce!
We got in, again! If you haven’t heard about Open Sauce, I highly recommend checking it out. It’s a fantastic event filled with thousands of makers and sciencey types, showing off all the cool and ridiculous things they’ve been building just for the heck of it. We’d love to see you there!
Last year’s Open Sauce was the first time I debuted the ADSBee project at an in-person event. A substantial portion of y’all who are reading this update on the website or via the mailing list found out about ADSBee after passing by the booth last year, and I’m excited to see both new and familiar faces this time around.
This year will be bigger and better, with new hardware and some fun projects. If you have a fun project featuring an ADSBee you’d like to show off at Open Sauce, I’d love to hear from you (shoot me a message on Discord)! If the stars align, I may also have some new receiver hardware available for sale at the event.
📶 New Ultra-Lightweight Dipole Antenna In Stock
I’ve received a limited quanitty of ultra-lightweight TBS crossfire-style dipole antennas tuned to 1090MHz that were designed and manufactured by a friend of the ADSBee project. If you’d like a lightweight antenna to install in your drone or other weight-sensitive ADSBee application, they’re in stock in the store now!
Weighing in at 0.8 grams, including the mass of 13 cm of OD1.13 coax, they’re hard to beat when it comes to weight! For best results, install them in a vertically polarized orientation, anchored to a low dielectric constant material (ie. mostly made of air) in a manner that the wires won’t get too bendy. For instance, taping the antenna to the vertical tail of a foam aircraft would probably work great.
🤫 New Hardware is on the way (slowly)
I’ve been hard at work on an updated version of the receiver hardware, with the intention of supporting dual band reception for the USA and potentially other countries. Currently, ADSBee only supports 1090MHz Mode S, which is an international standard used by the majority of aircraft with transponders, but there are still some gaps in coverage like 978MHz UAT (a protocol used by some small aircraft in the US). I hope to have more details on this upcoming design soon! There is still some design / test iteration to be done on hacky prototype hardware, and the ongoing trade war has made manufacturing a bit of a mess at the moment. I hope to have more details to share shortly, either in next month’s update or earlier!