ADS-B to CoT

Display Aircraft in TAK — ADS-B feed to TAK Gateway.

ADSBCOT is available for OpenMANET via opkg, but it is not installed by default. Once installed and enabled, you can forward aircraft tracks into the Team Awareness Kit (TAK) ecosystem with minimal effort. The integration is intentionally opinionated: it assumes an RTL-SDR–based receiver and multicasts the resulting Cursor on Target (CoT) data across the mesh for TAK clients to consume.

For deeper details, refer to the official ADSBCOT documentation.

Features

  • Converts ADS-B messages to CoT format for TAK clients.
  • Preserves aircraft track, course, speed vectors, and metadata.
  • Compatible with ATAK, TAKX, WinTAK, and iTAK.
  • Supports multiple ADS-B data aggregators and COTS receivers.
  • Accepts over-the-air RF ADS-B via SDR hardware.
  • Runs on Python 3.7+ across Windows and Linux.

Getting Started on OpenMANET

  1. Install ADSBCOT
    Install via LuCI (System → Software → Update lists → search adsbtocot → Install) or via CLI:

    opkg update
opkg install adsbtocot

  2. Connect the SDR
    Plug an RTL-SDR dongle into your Raspberry Pi (USB 3 preferred).

  3. Enable the services
    ADSB to CoT relies on two OpenWrt services:
    • dump1090 (collects raw ADS-B frames from the SDR)
    • adsbtocot (translates the feed into CoT and multicasts it)

    Enable them via the OpenWrt GUI (System → Startup) or through the CLI:

    /etc/init.d/dump1090 enable && /etc/init.d/dump1090 start
/etc/init.d/adsbtocot enable && /etc/init.d/adsbtocot start
  4. Verify multicast delivery
    Check on a device running ATAK if the COTS messages are flowing.

That’s it, once the SDR is connected and the services are running, aircraft will appear in ATAK/WinTAK just like any other TAK marker.

RTL-SDR dongle connected for ADS-B capture