ADS-B was a live table and nothing else: an aircraft was overhead for four
minutes and then gone, with nothing kept. Now everything heard goes into
adsb_<time>.jsonl as it arrives -- one object per frame, the raw hex beside
what was read out of it, flushed per line because a listening session ends
with control-C -- with a readable report beside it.
flights.py asks who the aircraft are: adsbdb for the airframe and the
route, hexdb behind it, cached for a month. What needs no website is
answered without one, because the ICAO address block says which country
registered the aircraft and the first three letters of an airline callsign
are its designator. Nothing but the address and the callsign heard on the
air is ever sent.
bandsaunter flights [LOG...] --out sky.gif
reads a log back and draws the evening as a map with the clock running.
Every frame is a moment: each aircraft is where it actually was then,
interpolated between the position reports either side of it and
dead-reckoned from its last speed and heading between them, and dropped
rather than guessed at once it has not been heard for --stale seconds.
The GIF is written here -- palette, LZW, frame differencing against a
transparent index -- so nothing but numpy is needed; ffmpeg writes an MP4
where it happens to be installed, and .png draws the whole evening at once.
The decoder needed 6.3 s to read a second of sky, so a live capture was
losing six frames in seven. Reading the bits off a running total instead
of summing each window takes that to 0.6 s, with identical output.
--simulate flies six aircraft that are not there past a receiver that is
not there, through the real encoder, the real checksum and the real
decoder, so all of this can be tried without an aerial.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016PsWPTweCT6pwxKngvVxcg
