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If you wish to feed RadarVirtuel, follow the steps below.

Feeding RadarVirtuel

The main goal of RadarVirtuel is to collect data about flights. Although RadarVirtuel welcomes feeding stations from all over the world, their differentiator is to collect information about traffic around smaller airports around the world.

The docker image ghcr.io/sdr-enthusiasts/docker-radarvirtuel contains the required feeder software and all required prerequisites and libraries. This needs to run in conjunction with ultrafeeder, tar1090, or another RAW provider.

Setting up Your Station

Obtaining an RadarVirtuel Feeder Key

First-time users should obtain a RadarVirtuel Feeder key. To request one, email [email protected] with the following information:

  • Your name
  • The Lat/Lon and nearest airport of your station
  • Your Raspberry Pi model (or other hardware if not Raspberry Pi)
  • Mention that you will feed using a Docker container.

Update .env file with RadarVirtuel Feeder Key

Inside your application directory (/opt/adsb), edit the .env file using your favorite text editor. Beginners may find the editor nano easy to use:

nano /opt/adsb/.env

This file holds all of the commonly used variables (such as our latitude, longitude and altitude). We're going to add our RadarVirtuel Feeder Key to this file. Add the following line to the file:

RV_FEEDER_KEY=YOURFEEDERKEY
  • Replace YOURFEEDERKEY with the key you received in response to your email.

For example:

RV_FEEDER_KEY=xxxx:432143214473214732017432014747382140723

Deploying feeder container

Open the docker-compose.yml file that was created when deploying ultrafeeder.

Append the following lines to the end of the file (inside the services: section).

  radarvirtuel:
    image: ghcr.io/sdr-enthusiasts/docker-radarvirtuel:latest
    container_name: radarvirtuel
    hostname: radarvirtuel
    restart: unless-stopped
    environment:
      - FEEDER_KEY=${RV_FEEDER_KEY}
      - SOURCE_HOST=ultrafeeder:30002
      - RV_SERVER=mg22.adsbnetwork.com:50050
      - VERBOSE=OFF
      - MLAT_SERVER=mlat.adsbnetwork.com:50000
      - MLAT_HOST=ultrafeeder:30005
      - LAT=${FEEDER_LAT}
      - LON=${FEEDER_LONG}
      - ALT=${FEEDER_ALT_M}
    tmpfs:
      - /tmp:rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,size=128M
    volumes:
      - "/etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro"
      - "/etc/timezone:/etc/timezone:ro"

To explain what's going on in this addition:

  • We're creating a container called radarvirtuel, from the image ghcr.io/sdr-enthusiasts/docker-radarvirtuel.
  • We're passing several environment variables to the container:
    • FEEDER_KEY contains the key that you added to .env as per the instructions above
    • SOURCE_HOST indicates where to get the RAW data from
    • RV_SERVER is the address of the RadarVirtuel server where your data will be sent. Please do not change this unless you're specifically instructed to
    • VERBOSE can be ON (meaning: show lots of information in the docker logs) or OFF (show only errors in the docker logs)
    • Enabling receiving MLAT RAW data and sending latitude, longitude and altitude from the .env file
  • The mounted volumes make sure that the container will use the same timezone as your host system

Update ultrafeeder container configuration

Before running docker compose, we also want to update the configuration of the ultrafeeder container, so that it generates MLAT data for radarvirtuel.

NOTE: If you are using the sample docker-compose.yml provided, this step has already been done for you.

Open the docker-compose.yml and make the following environment value is part of the ULTRAFEEDER_CONFIG variable to the ultrafeeder service:

      - ULTRAFEEDER_CONFIG=mlathub,radarvirtuel,30105,beast_in;

To explain this addition, the ultrafeeder container will connect to the radarvirtuel container on port 30105 and receive MLAT data. This data will then be included in any outbound data streams from ultrafeeder.

Refresh running containers

Once the file has been updated, issue the command docker compose pull radarvirtuel && docker compose up -d in the application directory to apply the changes and bring up the radarvirtuel container. You should see the following output:

 ✔ Container ultrafeeder  Running
 ✔ Container piaware      Running
 ✔ Container fr24         Running
 ✔ Container adsbhub      Running
 ✔ Container radarvirtuel Started

We can view the logs for the environment with the command docker logs radarvirtuel, or continually "tail" them with docker logs -f radarvirtuel. The logs will be fairly unexciting and look like this:

[s6-init] making user provided files available at /var/run/s6/etc...exited 0.
[s6-init] ensuring user provided files have correct perms...exited 0.
[fix-attrs.d] applying ownership & permissions fixes...
[fix-attrs.d] done.
[cont-init.d] executing container initialization scripts...
[cont-init.d] done.
[services.d] starting services
[radarvirtuel/radarvirtuel][Tue May  4 17:06:32 EDT 2021] RadarVirtuel was started as an s6 service
[services.d] done.
[radarvirtuel/imalive][Tue May  4 17:06:32 EDT 2021] Started as an s6 service

Once running, you can visit https://alpha.radarvirtuel.com/stations/xxxx (replace "xxxx" with the name of your station, which is the first part of the Feeder Key you received) to view the data you are feeding to RadarVirtuel. For example: https://alpha.radarvirtuel.com/stations/KBOS.

Troubleshooting

Most log messages are self-explanatory and have suggestions on how to trouble-shoot your issue. Here is some additional information that may help:

  • Sometimes, the logs may show error messages that it cannot connect to your SOURCE_HOST. If these messages show every few seconds, you have a problem (read below). If there are no new messages after a bit, it means that your station finally connected to the SOURCE_HOST. This connection delay is often caused by RadarVirtuel becoming "up and running" before tar1090 or ultrafeeder do. This will fix itself within less than a minute.
  • This message keeps on scrolling and it doesn't stop after a while. In that case, tar1090 or ultrafeeder cannot be reached.
    • If you configured tar1090, there's nothing else to configure. Make sure the tar1090 container is up and running and is receiving data!
  • You see log messages about the Feeder Key being incorrect. This is quite self-explanatory: check your feeder key.
  • You see messages about not being able to reach the RadarVirtuel Server. This may be a temporary outage. If the message consists for several hours, please contact [email protected] to see if there's something going on.

Advanced

If you want to look at more options and examples for the radarvirtuel container, you can find the repository here

More information and support

  • RadarVirtuel and ADSBNetwork are owned and operated by Laurent Duval, who can be reached at [email protected]
  • You can always find help on the #adsb-containers channel on the SDR Enthusiasts Discord server. This channel is meant for Noobs (beginners) and Experts alike.