Skylens Multiband Receiver
SkyLens is a receiver solution for electronic conspicuity signals such as FLARM, ADS-L and ADS-B. It runs on off-the-shelf hardware and delivers decoded traffic data in an easy-to-use JSON format. SkyLens scales from a single receiver at a local airfield to country-wide networks – for situational awareness, fleet management and tracking, or U-space and ATC applications.
SkyLens uses software-defined radios (SDR) for high sensitivity and long reception range. Each receiver node decodes the signals locally and outputs aircraft positions and alert zones together with relevant metadata.
All versions of the FLARM radio protocol are supported, as is ADS-L on 868 and 869 MHz. ADS-B on 1090 MHz is available on request and requires an additional SDR.
Architecture
SkyLens runs on receiver nodes. Each node consists of a single-board computer such as a Raspberry Pi, an SDR USB dongle and an antenna. The SkyLens software demodulates and decodes the received signals and outputs every aircraft position or alert zone as a JSON message, including metadata such as signal strength and receiver ID.
The data can be used directly on site – for example at a single airfield – or sent to a central server via encrypted MQTT (TLS), UDP or an HTTP stream. The central server is not part of SkyLens: you integrate the node outputs into your own system, which merges the data of all nodes and removes duplicate reports of aircraft received by several nodes.
Each node provides Prometheus metrics for monitoring, which can be integrated into Grafana or similar tools.
