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A callsign is a flight number rather than a leg, and the free registers hold one route per number, so an aircraft over Arizona kept being handed a hop between two airports in Texas. Nothing on the air settles it: ADS-B carries no origin or destination. A commercial schedule service does know, because it holds the day's actual movements. Four are wired up and all four are optional: FlightAware AeroAPI, Flightradar24, OAG and Cirium. Each is asked before the free databases and each answers for the moment the aircraft was overhead rather than for the flight number in general, so the leg chosen is the one that was in the air. With no keys set nothing changes at all: a source with no key is skipped rather than asked and refused, and the free databases answer as before. Keys come from the environment and are never written to the settings file, because a settings file is meant to be copied between machines and pasted into a message asking for help, and an API key is not. There is a test that holds that line. None of the four has been run against its live service, since each wants a paid account. They were written from the published response shapes and are tested against those shapes, so each reader finds what it recognises and returns nothing otherwise: a service that has changed since costs a route rather than a scan. Cirium's plain departureTime is local and carries no offset, so the UTC field is preferred where it is there -- reading the local one as UTC is up to half a day out, which is exactly far enough to pick the wrong leg of the same number. Reading now happens inside the same guard as asking, as an answer shaped differently from the documented one is the failure most likely to actually happen. And the map. The zoom is now chosen from how wide the picture is rather than from the area alone, with half again over the width fetched and averaged down, since a downscaled tile is sharp and an upscaled one is not. The window fetches a little more world than it shows so panning does not leave the ground blank, and now fetches that bigger piece at the bigger piece's own size: rendering it into the window's own pixels and stretching it back was a fifth of an upscale over the whole map, which is what a sharp map looks like when it looks blurred. The comment in the fetcher said the opposite of what the code did, which is how it stayed hidden. At 1920 by 1080 over a hundred miles the tiles now hold about 1.6 times the pixels the window wants. At 3840 by 2160 the tile budget is reached, the zoom stops climbing and the map is enlarged after all; a smaller radius buys the detail back, and somebody else's tile server is not a thing to fetch a thousand tiles from for one picture. The README says so rather than implying otherwise. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016PsWPTweCT6pwxKngvVxcg
16 KiB
Installing bandsaunter
Step by step, from nothing to a scan running. The whole of it is four dependencies and one C library; there is nothing to compile and no model to download unless you want speech transcription.
If you are on Debian, Ubuntu or Mint, build the package — it is two commands and apt does the rest. Anywhere else, use a virtual environment.
You can try the whole program before buying or plugging in a receiver.
--simulate runs the scanner against a synthetic band, and bandsaunter adsb --simulate flies imaginary aircraft past an imaginary receiver. Neither needs
hardware or a network.
What you need
| Python | 3.10 or newer |
| A receiver | any RTL2832U dongle (RTL-SDR Blog v3/v4, NESDR, generic) — optional, everything except live scanning works without one |
| An aerial | whatever came with the dongle to start; a band-cut aerial for anything serious |
| Disk | ~250 MB for the program and its dependencies; recordings are what actually fill a disk |
| Network | only for installing, and for callsign and aircraft lookups afterwards |
Operating systems: developed and packaged on Debian; runs on any Linux with
Python 3.10+, and on macOS with brew install librtlsdr. On Windows it will
run under WSL2 with USB passthrough, which is more trouble than it is worth —
a Raspberry Pi is the easier answer.
A. Debian, Ubuntu, Mint: the package
git clone <the repository> bandsaunter
cd bandsaunter
./packaging/build-deb.sh # writes dist/bandsaunter_<version>_all.deb
sudo apt install ./dist/bandsaunter_*.deb
That is the whole of it. build-deb.sh needs only dpkg-deb and fakeroot,
both already present on a normal system; apt then pulls in numpy, scipy, rich,
PyYAML and librtlsdr itself.
The package also does the one piece of system setup that a pip install
cannot: it blacklists the DVB-T television driver, which claims these dongles
on sight. Read what it prints — if a receiver was plugged in during the
install, unplug and replug it, or run sudo rmmod dvb_usb_rtl28xxu once.
Uninstall with sudo apt remove bandsaunter, which also removes the blacklist.
For several machines: your own apt repository
./packaging/build-repo.sh builds the application, a speech recogniser and a
model into a small apt repository under dist/repo, so that apt install bandsaunter on every other machine brings transcription with it. See
Install → From your own apt repository in the README.
B. Anywhere else: a virtual environment
Debian, Ubuntu and Fedora refuse pip install outside a virtual
environment (PEP 668: "externally-managed-environment"). That is the error
most people hit first, and a virtual environment is the answer:
sudo apt install librtlsdr0 # Debian/Ubuntu/Mint
# sudo dnf install rtl-sdr # Fedora
# sudo pacman -S rtl-sdr # Arch
# brew install librtlsdr # macOS
git clone <the repository> bandsaunter
cd bandsaunter
python3 -m venv .venv
. .venv/bin/activate
pip install . # a few wheels; under a minute
That installs four wheels — numpy, scipy, rich, PyYAML — and puts two commands
on the path, bandsaunter and saunterbrowse. Nothing is built from source.
Use pip install -e . instead if you intend to change the code.
The commands only exist while the environment is active. To have them always, install with pipx instead, which keeps its own environment and puts the commands on your path permanently:
sudo apt install pipx && pipx install /path/to/bandsaunter
As a last resort — a throwaway machine, a container — pip install --break-system-packages . overrides the refusal. It puts the dependencies in
among the system ones, which is what the warning is about.
Check that it worked
bandsaunter --version
bandsaunter bands # the built-in US band plan; no hardware needed
bandsaunter scan -b 2m --simulate # a whole scan against a synthetic band
bandsaunter adsb --simulate --seconds 30
bandsaunter flights # draws what the last command heard
With a receiver plugged in:
bandsaunter devices # should list the dongle
bandsaunter devices --test # opens it and captures a block
bandsaunter # interactive setup, then scanning
bandsaunter devices is the command to run when something is wrong: it says
whether librtlsdr loaded, whether a dongle was found, and what to do about it
if not.
Optional dependencies
Everything below is genuinely optional. The program starts, scans, records, identifies, decodes Morse and draws waterfalls with none of it, and says plainly when a feature is unavailable rather than failing.
| Install | Gives you | Without it |
|---|---|---|
sudo apt install espeak-ng |
clearer spoken timestamps on combined recordings, rendered about three times faster | a built-in formant synthesiser does the same job, less clearly |
sudo apt install ffmpeg |
bandsaunter flights --out sky.mp4 writes a video |
a GIF is written instead, and it says so |
sudo apt install rtl-sdr |
rtl_test, rtl_sdr and friends, for diagnosing hardware |
nothing missing from bandsaunter itself |
pip install faster-whisper |
speech transcription of recorded voice — see the step-by-step below (~250 MB installed, plus a 148 MB model) | transcription is off; scans report that no recogniser is installed |
pip install vosk |
a smaller, weaker recogniser (~10 MB plus a 40 MB model) | as above |
sudo apt install python3-pyqt6 |
the realtime aircraft window (bandsaunter adsb --window) |
the terminal board still shows every aircraft, and the maps are still drawn afterwards |
pip install pyte |
the terminal-resize tests | those tests skip |
The aircraft window needs Qt, and any of four bindings will do — PyQt6,
PyQt5, PySide6 or PySide2 — because distributions disagree about which they
package. python3-pyqt6 on Debian and Fedora, python-pyqt6 on Arch, or
pip install PyQt6 in the environment bandsaunter runs from. Without it the
window is the only thing missing, and the program says so rather than failing.
Aircraft and callsign lookups need no installation, only a network. They
ask public registers about a callsign or a 24-bit address and cache the
answers for a month; --no-lookup turns them off, and what the address and
the callsign say on their own is worked out offline either way.
Optional: a paid schedule service
Nothing here needs installing either — these are accounts, not packages, and all four are optional. They answer the one question the free registers cannot: an airline runs the same flight number over several legs in a day, and a free register holds one route per number, so it will often name somebody else's leg. A schedule service holds the day's actual movements.
| Service | Sign up at | Set |
|---|---|---|
| FlightAware AeroAPI | https://www.flightaware.com/commercial/aeroapi/ | BANDSAUNTER_AEROAPI_KEY |
| Flightradar24 | https://fr24api.flightradar24.com/ | BANDSAUNTER_FR24_TOKEN |
| OAG Flight Info | https://developer.oag.com/ | BANDSAUNTER_OAG_KEY |
| Cirium (FlightStats) | https://developer.cirium.com/ | BANDSAUNTER_CIRIUM_APP_ID and BANDSAUNTER_CIRIUM_APP_KEY |
Put the ones you have in your shell profile:
echo 'export BANDSAUNTER_AEROAPI_KEY=your-key-here' >> ~/.bashrc
. ~/.bashrc
Keys are read from the environment and never written to the settings file, on purpose: a settings file gets copied between machines and pasted into messages asking for help, and an API key should not travel that way.
Any service whose key is set is asked; one whose key is not set is skipped
silently, and the free registers answer exactly as they did before.
--schedules flightaware,oag picks which to ask and in what order. Only the
callsign and the time are ever sent.
These readers were written from each service's published response format and tested against it, but none has been run against a live service, because each one needs a paid account. Each is written to return nothing rather than guess, so a service that has changed its format costs you a route, not a scan.
Speech transcription, step by step
This is the only part with a real download in it, and the only part Debian cannot supply, so it gets its own section. Two pieces are needed: the recogniser (a Python package) and the model it loads (the weights). Scanning, recording, identifying and CW decoding all work without either.
Step 1 — install the recogniser where bandsaunter can see it
The recogniser must go into the same environment bandsaunter itself runs from, or bandsaunter will not find it.
If you installed into a virtual environment:
. .venv/bin/activate # the same one bandsaunter is in
pip install faster-whisper
If you installed for your user with pip install --user (the layout this
project was developed with, everything under ~/.local):
pip install --user --break-system-packages faster-whisper
--break-system-packages is what gets past the PEP 668 refusal described
above; with --user it writes to ~/.local/lib/python3.x/site-packages and
touches nothing the distribution owns.
This pulls in ctranslate2, av, huggingface-hub, tokenizers and
onnxruntime — about 250 MB installed, no compiler needed, all wheels.
Step 2 — check bandsaunter can see it
bandsaunter transcribe --engines
engine installed how to get it
faster-whisper yes pip install faster-whisper (best on radio audio)
whisper no pip install openai-whisper
whisper-cli no whisper.cpp, no Python dependencies
vosk no pip install vosk (small, weaker on noisy audio)
pocketsphinx no pip install pocketsphinx (tiny, poor on radio audio)
auto would use faster-whisper
installed: yes against faster-whisper and a last line naming it is the
whole test. If it says no while pip says the package is there, they are in
different environments — see When it does not work.
Step 3 — get the model
The model is not in the pip package. By default base.en is used, and
the first transcription downloads it from Hugging Face
(Systran/faster-whisper-base.en) into ~/.cache/huggingface/hub/, about
140 MB. Everything after that is offline.
You can leave it to happen by itself, but a scan that appears to hang for a minute on its first voice capture is unnerving, so it is better to fetch it deliberately:
python3 -c "from faster_whisper import WhisperModel; WhisperModel('base.en', device='cpu', compute_type='int8')"
du -sh ~/.cache/huggingface # about 140 MB when it has finished
To watch what any engine is doing, including a download in progress:
BANDSAUNTER_ENGINE_OUTPUT=1 bandsaunter transcribe recording.wav --stdout
Model sizes, measured from the repository listings:
| Model | Download | Notes |
|---|---|---|
tiny.en |
78 MB | fastest; misses words on noisy radio audio |
base.en |
148 MB | the default; keeps up comfortably on an ordinary machine |
small.en |
486 MB | noticeably better on weak signals, several times slower |
medium.en |
1.5 GB | better again; wants a fast machine and patience |
large-v3 |
3.1 GB | multilingual, and slow on a CPU |
Everything runs on the CPU, at int8 — no GPU, no CUDA, no nvidia packages, on purpose: a scanner should not need a graphics card, and int8 on a CPU keeps up with a scan.
Step 4 — turn it on
bandsaunter transcribe recording.wav --stdout # one file, straight away
bandsaunter transcribe ~/bandsaunter # a whole directory
bandsaunter scan -b 2m --transcribe # during a scan
bandsaunter config transcribe=true # or make that the default
bandsaunter config transcribe_model=small.en # and choose the model
During a scan, transcription runs on its own thread after each recording is
written, so it never holds up the sweep. Transcripts land beside the audio as
<recording>_transcription.txt, and saunterbrowse shows them.
Doing it without a network, or on many machines
./packaging/build-repo.sh collects the recogniser and the model into two
Debian packages, so no machine you install on ever reaches the network:
MODEL=base.en ./packaging/build-repo.sh # any size from the table above
That produces bandsaunter-transcribe (the wheels, unpacked into
/usr/lib/bandsaunter/vendor) and bandsaunter-model-base-en (the weights,
in /usr/share/bandsaunter/models/base.en), and an apt repository serving
them alongside bandsaunter itself. Both are Recommends, so a plain apt install bandsaunter from that repository brings the lot.
For a machine that is not using apt, copy the model directory anywhere and point at it:
export BANDSAUNTER_MODEL_DIR=/opt/models # holds base.en/, small.en/ ...
bandsaunter config transcribe_model=/opt/models/base.en # or an outright path
A model name that matches a directory under BANDSAUNTER_MODEL_DIR is used
from disk; anything else is left to the recogniser to download.
A smaller alternative
vosk is a tenth of the size and much weaker on the noisy, clipped audio
radio produces. It is worth it on a Raspberry Pi and not otherwise:
pip install vosk # ~10 MB
bandsaunter config transcribe_engine=vosk
It fetches its own small model on first use, by language; point
transcribe_model at an unpacked model directory to use a specific one.
When it does not work
externally-managed-environment from pip. Use a virtual environment or
pipx, as above. This is the distribution protecting its own Python, not a
problem with bandsaunter.
bandsaunter transcribe --engines says no although pip installed it.
The recogniser went into a different environment from bandsaunter. Ask each
of them where it is and compare:
python3 -c "import bandsaunter, sys; print(sys.executable); print(bandsaunter.__file__)"
python3 -c "import faster_whisper; print(faster_whisper.__file__)"
Install the recogniser with the same pip that owns the first path — the
venv's pip for a venv install, pip install --user --break-system-packages
for a ~/.local one. On a .deb install, bandsaunter runs as the system
python3 and looks in /usr/lib/bandsaunter/vendor as well, which is what
the bandsaunter-transcribe package fills.
The first transcription takes a minute and prints nothing. It is
downloading the model. BANDSAUNTER_ENGINE_OUTPUT=1 shows the progress, and
Step 3 above fetches it deliberately instead.
librtlsdr was not found. Install it: librtlsdr0 on Debian/Ubuntu,
rtl-sdr on Fedora and Arch, brew install librtlsdr on macOS. Everything
that does not touch the receiver keeps working without it.
bandsaunter devices finds nothing, or cannot open the dongle. Almost
always the DVB-T driver, which claims these dongles the moment they are
plugged in:
echo 'blacklist dvb_usb_rtl28xxu' | sudo tee /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-rtl.conf
sudo rmmod dvb_usb_rtl28xxu
Then unplug and replug the receiver. The .deb does this for you.
Permission denied opening the device. On Debian and Ubuntu the
librtlsdr0 package installs the udev rule that grants access, so this is
rare; if you built librtlsdr yourself, you need the rule from its source tree
in /etc/udev/rules.d, then sudo udevadm control --reload and a replug.
Nothing is recorded. That is usually correct behaviour rather than a
fault: captures are kept only when they carry voice, decodable CW or an
identified digital scheme. bandsaunter scan -b 2m --simulate proves the
whole path end to end without an aerial.
Running the tests
pip install pytest pyte
python3 -m pytest tests/ -q
About 1500 tests and around fifteen minutes; they need no hardware and no network.
Licence
GNU General Public License, version 3 or later. The full text is in
LICENSE, and in an installed package at
/usr/share/doc/bandsaunter/copyright.