Engineering project / Signal processing
ADS-B receiver
From radio samples to aircraft positions.
Project overview
0:22 · SilentThe project
A MATLAB receiver and decoder for ADS-B aircraft broadcasts. The archived application consumes a course TCP sample stream; RTL-SDR is the upstream hardware context, rather than a verified direct device-control path.
The pipeline
The work covered preamble detection, message decoding, CRC-24 validation and decoding DF17 messages into aircraft position information for mapping.
The course supplied several central algorithms as compiled MATLAB functions. This portfolio describes the assembled receiver and decoding workflow without claiming independent authorship of every stage.
Verification boundary
An offline synthetic DF17 check exercised preamble detection, message and CRC handling, position decoding and a one-marker map output. This checks the decoding path on controlled data; live RTL-SDR/TCP reception and real-aircraft tracking remain unverified.
Why it interests me
It is a concrete example of a signal-processing pipeline: starting with samples from the physical world and progressively turning them into interpretable information.
A reminder that useful software often starts well before the data becomes a table.
Source code kept private. Happy to discuss the architecture and my work.