stationd

The Station feeder runtime. One binary that runs an ADS-B receiver for you: it supervises the radio and the MLAT client, feeds the networks you choose, and shows how the station is doing on one page. Made for the FlightPortrait network, non-exclusive by design: adsb.lol, adsb.fi, adsb.win and any other aggregator are one line each.

Install

A Raspberry Pi (3B or newer) or any Debian-family machine, an RTL-SDR dongle, an antenna:

curl -fsSL https://flightportrait.com/station/install.sh | sh

The installer says what it does before each step. It downloads three release binaries into ~/station, installs a systemd service, and prints the address of the setup page. Open it on your phone: name the station, put the antenna on the map, tick the networks to feed. Done.

Already running readsb, PiAware, FR24 or ultrafeeder? The installer notices and asks: --add leaves it alone and prints the one line that makes it feed FlightPortrait; --replace imports its feeds and keys and takes over. --print shows the manual path. docs/PI.md has the details.

What it does

• Supervises rx, the Station radio, with readsb as fallback, and mlatc, one MLAT client for every server. A child that dies is restarted with backoff; all output lands in one journal.
• Validates station.toml before starting. Every problem is a sentence that says what to fix; a half-configured station never runs.
• Serves /status.json and a status page: aircraft now, message rate, today against yesterday, farthest heard, MLAT sync per feed. A healthy page has no prose. When something is wrong, one plain sentence says what and what to do about it.
• With no configuration file, serves the setup wizard instead; stationd --init does the same in a terminal over SSH.

Run from source

cargo build --release
./target/release/stationd --config station.toml # no file: setup mode
curl http://127.0.0.1:8654/status.json

station.example.toml documents every field; --check validates and exits.

What leaves the machine

Frames go to the networks you tick, each with the station key you gave it. The setup page, in your browser, uses OpenFreemap for tiles, Nominatim for address search, Open-Meteo for ground elevation, and ipwho.is for a first rough map position; nothing is stored there. The status page is LAN-only and unauthenticated, like a router's first-run page.

License

AGPL-3.0-or-later (LICENSE-AGPL). MapLibre GL is vendored under BSD-3; see NOTICE.