I've been playing around with software defined radio stuff lately. I feel like such at hacker! I managed to listen in to my local PD's radio comms, which frequency hop and are digitally encoded (It's trunked P25). I did all this with a $20 USB dongle and free software. A police scanner that decodes this kind of radio traffic costs $500+. Next on my list of things to try is mapping aircraft in real time by listening to their ADS-B that they broadcast while flying.
This looks nice! Does this dongle work for a wide range of frequencies like the RTL-SDR dongles and is just better at ADS-B, or does it only work well for ADS-B and not well for anything else? I'm looking to buy another RTL-SDR dongle in the future to listen to trunked radio better.
I haven't used it, but I went down the rabbit hole with FR24 to the point where I applied to host their equipment. FlightAware put their name on this thing and is selling it stupid cheap; I have no idea what you can do with it besides flight tracking. You'll still need an antenna.