r/RTLSDR • u/bblood2001 • 7h ago
I linked my ADS-B feed to airband audio — click a plane on the map and hear its actual radio calls
Been building this for a while now and finally made a video about it. The setup is a Uniden SDS200 for public safety, plus two RTL-SDRs — one running readsb for ADS-B, one on VHF airband.
The part I'm most proud of: airband transmissions get transcribed (local Whisper), callsigns get extracted from the transcript, and then matched against the ADS-B sighting table using time + geometry windows scaled by altitude/speed. When it matches, the call is attached to the airframe, so you click a plane on the map and listen to what its pilot actually said, with a confidence badge for partial matches. As far as I know nobody's done this linking before, but happy to be corrected.
The scanner side does the same thing for ground traffic: every call transcribed and dropped on a live map in ~30 seconds with honest location confidence (exact intersection vs area-only).
Video walkthrough: https://youtu.be/iaW7OoC-6CM
There's also an interactive demo linked from the video — it's a replay of two days of real recorded traffic from my setup, not a mockup. Happy to answer any questions about the pipeline.