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ADS-B Aircraft Tracking → TAK

Polls the adsb.lol community feed for aircraft within a configurable point + radius and emits one CoT air-track per aircraft. Tracks carry altitude, speed, and heading so they render correctly on TAK clients as moving aircraft symbols.

Read the Flows overview first

Import the GeoJSON to CoT subflow before importing this flow.

Why adsb.lol and not OpenSky?

OpenSky Network moved most queries behind OAuth2 in late 2025 and aggressively rate-limits or silently drops anonymous queries from cloud provider IP ranges (AWS, GCP, Azure). FastTAK deployments running on Lightsail, EC2, or any VPS will see timeouts even on small bounding-box queries.

adsb.lol is a community-run feed built on the readsb / tar1090 ecosystem. Public, no authentication, no API key, no ASN filtering. Coverage matches the global crowdsourced ADS-B receiver network, which is excellent over populated areas.

What it emits

  • One CoT point event per aircraft, per poll cycle:
    • Type a-n-A-C-F (neutral / air / civilian / fixed-wing) — override in the subflow instance for friendly (a-f-A-C-F), unknown (a-u-A), or rotary (a-n-A-C-H) tracks.
    • Callsign — ATC callsign (e.g., UAL1234) if known, else registration (e.g., N12345), else ICAO 24-bit hex address.
    • Remarks — ICAO hex, registration, type code, altitude (ft), ground speed (kt), heading (°), squawk.
    • <point hae> — geometric altitude in meters (falls back to barometric altitude if geo-alt is unavailable).
    • <track> — course (degrees true) and ground speed (m/s).
  • UID — adsb-<icao24> — stable across polls so the same aircraft updates rather than spawning duplicates.
  • Stale — 60 seconds; aircraft that stop reporting disappear from the map within a minute.

Install

Before you start

1. Import

Node-RED → ☰ → Import → Local → fasttak → adsb → Import.

2. Configure TLS

☰ → Configuration nodes → ADS-B Server TLS → "Use key or certificate from local file" → replace {svc_user} → Update.

3. Set your AO

Edit the AO change node:

Field Meaning Example (Denver)
lat center latitude (decimal degrees) 39.7
lon center longitude (decimal degrees) -104.99
radius search radius in nautical miles 100

The values are interpolated into the Fetch states http-request URL via {{lat}} / {{lon}} / {{radius}} mustache templates, so the URL shown in the node is the literal template — that's expected.

4. Deploy

First poll fires within 5 seconds. Aircraft symbols appear in TAK clients shortly after.

Tuning poll interval

Default 15 seconds. adsb.lol doesn't publish a hard rate limit, but single-flow / single-AO polling at 15s is well-mannered. If you run multiple ADS-B flows for different AOs, stagger the inject nodes so they don't all fire on the same second.

Type mapping

adsb.lol doesn't distinguish military from civilian transponders. Default is neutral civilian. Adjust COT_TYPE in the subflow instance if you:

  • Want friendly display for your own fleet (e.g., known tail numbers): a-f-A-C-F. Pre-filter the GeoJSON in the Aircraft → GeoJSON node by registration / ICAO allowlist.
  • Need rotary-wing symbols: a-n-A-C-H.

For type-per-aircraft (e.g., tag known military hex codes as a-h-A-M-F), extend the Aircraft → GeoJSON function to look up a.hex against an allowlist and set properties.cotType per feature, then read it in a custom subflow variant.

Verify

docker compose logs -f nodered | grep -iE 'adsb|http request'

A clean run shows successive HTTP 200 responses from api.adsb.lol. The function node logs a warning if the response body doesn't match the expected schema ({ ac: [...] }).

Files

  • nodered/flows-library/adsb.json