A Rough Guide to Wingbits

I’ve been watch­ing Wing­bits for a while now. They’re a new DePIN reward­ing you for track­ing com­mer­cial and pri­vate planes, and some parts of the project remind me of the ear­ly days of Heli­um, back when I wrote the orig­i­nal Rough Guide for Heli­um. Wing­bits is a project that allows you to choose your hard­ware and that rewards you for pro­vid­ing “bet­ter” ser­vice. In the ear­ly days of Heli­um I gained a sig­nif­i­cant advan­tage by try­ing to pro­vide the absolute best ser­vice over just stick­ing a Hotspot in a win­dow. I *think* the same kind of think­ing will be use­ful for Wingbits.

First, let’s go through what Wing­bits is. Wing­bits rewards you for plac­ing hard­ware (a small com­put­er like a Rasp­ber­ry Pi con­nect­ed to a radio receiv­er and an anten­na) and receiv­ing auto­mat­ic trans­mis­sions from most com­mer­cial air­craft regard­ing where they are and how fast they’re going. If you want to fast for­ward and just buy the gear now because you’re all excit­ed, skip ahead here. Just remem­ber to come back here and keep reading.

The trans­mis­sions you’ll cap­ture are called ADS‑B, or Auto­mat­ic Depen­dent Sur­veil­lance — Broad­cast. They pro­vide the GPS loca­tion, alti­tude, ground speed, and oth­er infor­ma­tion about an air­craft. This trans­mis­sion is pub­lic, and can be received by any­one. It is more accu­rate than radar, and is required for most air­craft in the US.

Basi­cal­ly, ADS‑B is a way for an air­craft to say, “Hey, I’m here, I’m going this fast, at this alti­tude; DON’T HIT ME!”

Like all DePINs, in return for you set­ting up the hard­ware and pass­ing data, in this case ADS‑B data through Wing­bits, you receive tokens. Those tokens can be trad­ed for oth­er currency.

Ok, so why has Wing­bits par­tic­u­lar­ly caught my atten­tion? Because unlike many oth­er DePIN projects, you can build your own hard­ware, you can make that hard­ware bet­ter, and bet­ter hard­ware means poten­tial­ly more tokens.

Now, NONE OF THIS IS FINANCIAL ADVICE, so don’t go spend­ing mon­ey just because you read about it on some guy’s blog on the inter­net. Do your own research before jump­ing in.

For me, Wing­bits rep­re­sents three oppor­tu­ni­ties: First, the chal­lenge of build­ing some­thing in the radio world. Sec­ond, the chance to learn about some­thing new. Third, the abil­i­ty to write about this and share it with folks. All of those are super fun for me. Take care­ful note that earn­ing tokens is NOT in my top three rea­sons for doing this. Yes, it’s fun and a way to keep score, but for me that’s about where it ends.

Before we get to how to build a rad ADS‑B set up for Wing­bits, let’s talk about why this par­tic­u­lar DePIN exists. 

ADS‑B data has tra­di­tion­al­ly been gath­ered and sup­plied by vol­un­teer hob­by­ists. These are the kinds of nerds who just like find­ing things out and shar­ing what they know. For years, these hob­by­ists have pro­vid­ed the data they col­lect to a com­pa­ny called ADS‑B Exchange for free; the com­pa­ny made it easy to see all the oth­er infor­ma­tion pro­vid­ed, and most hob­by­ists were sat­is­fied with that arrangement. 

Then, in Jan­u­ary of 2023, ADS‑B Exchange sold to Jet­Net for a report­ed $20,000,000. All of a sud­den, the hob­by­ists who’d been pro­vid­ing free info real­ized that what they’d been doing had val­ue. They just did­n’t know how to cap­ture it. Enter Wing­bits, an attempt to cap­ture the val­ue pro­vid­ed by hob­by­ists and return some of it to them for their con­tri­bu­tions, using the DePIN model.

Ok, so HOW do you make the best pos­si­ble set­up? Let’s approach this from two angles: What the net­work “wants”, and how best to pro­vide that.

Orig­i­nal­ly, the Wing­bits teams licensed out hex­es. If you bought one, you could earn from it; if you did­n’t, you could­n’t. As the project grew, they decid­ed to change that. I think I’ve scrubbed out ref­er­ences to “buy­ing hex­es” below, but keep in mind that at the end of the day, the per­son who pro­vides the “best” cov­er­age in a hex is like­ly to earn the most tokens.

Let’s start with the size you’ll have to cov­er. In the Wing­bits Litepaper (a rough sketch of what the project is about), the rewards sys­tem is set up around hexa­gons from the Uber H3 sys­tem. The hex sizes are res 3, or about 4,600 square miles of area and about 73 miles between par­al­lel edges. In the below view you can see those hexes. 

There are 41,162 res3 hex­es in the world, most of which are in the ocean and prob­a­bly can’t be cov­ered. That leaves us earth-dwellers with about 15k hex­es to pop­u­late. Each hexa­gon has a fixed amount of Wings tokens assigned to it dai­ly. As of 08June2024, that num­ber is 24. 

Rewards in this sys­tem are direct­ly tied to the quan­ti­ty and qual­i­ty of uploaded teleme­try data

Wing­bits Sky­Hex Medi­um article

These rewards may change over time. Please refer to Wing­bits doc­u­men­ta­tion for the latest.

Ok, what does that mean for you? Wing­bits wants you to RELIABLY cap­ture LOTS of HIGH QUALITY data. The bet­ter you do at any of those, the more you’ll be rewarded.

So, let’s do a cou­ple of examples. 

Wings Tokens Earning Example 1

You’re out in Mon­tana, all alone in your hex and you’ve deployed 1 anten­na. Let’s say you’re try­ing to be awe­some and keep this thing on all the time, for 100% uptime.

You’ll earn: 100% uptime x 100% of data (you’re the only anten­na) x 24 Wings = 24 Wings/day.

Wings Tokens Earning Example 2

For this one let’s imag­ine you’re also in the hex I am, here in San Diego. You’re com­mit­ted to excel­lence (like me) but you’ve got janky inter­net, so you’re not up all the time. Still, you’re in a great loca­tion, so you actu­al­ly cap­ture 70% of the data to my 30%.

You’ll earn: 70% of data x 24 Wings = 16.8 Wings/day.

Wings Tokens Earning Example 3

Worst case sce­nario here: You’re in San Fran­cis­co. Aside from the excel­lent food and being in the heart of tech­no­log­i­cal inno­va­tion, you’ve got some seri­ous down­sides; name­ly the num­ber of peo­ple com­pet­ing with you.

You’re only cap­tur­ing 15% of the unique data; the oth­er anten­nas are just out­com­pet­ing you.

Avail­able Wings: 15% x 24 = 3.6 Wings/day.

Important to Note: You Don’t Need To Be Deployed In Your Hex

You just need to pro­vide cov­er­age for the hex you bought. You could live out­side of it, or on the edge of it way up on a moun­tain, not actu­al­ly have you anten­na deployed inside the phys­i­cal hex, and still be pro­vid­ing excel­lent coverage. 

Now, HOW you cap­ture that data is where I think the fun part comes in. Remem­ber, you want to RELIABLY cap­ture LOTS of HIGH QUALITY data.

RELIABLE means you’ve got a strong and fast inter­net con­nec­tion so your hard­ware does­n’t go down. I know some of you are going to use the WiFi side of the Rasp­ber­ry Pi, and to be hon­est, that’ll prob­a­bly work fine. I’ll be using an eth­er­net cable. I’m aim­ing to win, yo.

LOTS of data will depend on where you are as far as your “sight­lines” to air­craft and where you place your anten­na. I know, I know, it’s easy to put it inside near your win­dow and call it good. Just remem­ber, if there’s one per­son like me any­where near you, they’ll be putting that anten­na up high where it has clear lines of sight every­where, and they’ll crush you. This is a con­test, after all.

The oth­er thing to remem­ber with LOTS of data is where YOU are vs where your anten­na will cov­er. In many cas­es you”ll have a range of over 100 miles, so even if you’re in the mid­dle of a hex (and you buy the one you live in) you could rea­son­ably buy sur­round­ing hex­es and pick up traf­fic there.

HIGH QUALITY data is where we start to ven­ture into the black mag­ic of radio. You’ll want to be cap­ture exact­ly the right sig­nal, and you’ll want that sig­nal to be clean and strong. Get­ting that com­bi­na­tion will require an anten­na tuned to the ADS‑B fre­quen­cies. There are 2, the main one is 1090 MHz and the oth­er one, much less used, is 978 MHz. I’ll roll with one of each just to see what hap­pens, although my focus is on 1090.

Just for clar­i­ty on that, the 1090 is the world­wide stan­dard. 978 is US only, and real­ly for small­er craft. I’ll go after 978 because it’s fun and I’m in the US. Most folks should focus on 1090.

The next part of high qual­i­ty data, once you get a sig­nal on a tuned anten­na, is fil­ter­ing out the “trash” around it. For that, you can use any num­ber of fil­ters. I’ve linked one that is fine below. If you want to go bat­shit crazy and get the cus­tom-made pure glo­ry, DM me. It prob­a­bly does­n’t make a dif­fer­ence, but I like nice stuff, so I bought one. 

Third is an LNA, or Low Noise Ampli­fi­er. This is built into the gear linked below, so as long as you get that you don’t need to wor­ry much about it.

Now, I’m POSITIVE some radio-nerd will read this and point out how I could read the ADS‑B off the UFOs on the back­side of the moon if I just did [insert your favorite radio hack here]. That’s what makes this fun; there’s all kinds of stuff you can do to lev­el up your game. Remem­ber, this is just the Rough Guide. It’ll get ya 80% there, and prob­a­bly 95% if you buy every­thing below. 

Gear List

You’ll need at a min­i­mum a small com­put­er (Rasp­ber­ry Pi), an SDR (radio receiv­er) and an anten­na. Sep­a­rate the Rasp­ber­ry Pi from the SDR with a USB extension.

You may want to invest in nicer gear, although I’d cau­tion against that unless you know what you’re doing. I’ll cov­er opti­miza­tion in a lat­er post; the first big step here is to use gear spe­cif­ic to 1090. I know, I know, you have some old Heli­um anten­nas lay­ing around. It’s true that they work, but it’s like bring­ing a knife to a gun fight. You want to win, right?

If you want to sup­port the Gris­tle King enter­prise and say thanks for writ­ing this blog, use the fol­low­ing Ama­zon refer­ral links to get a basic set up.

[ninja_tables id=“6525”]

If you want to spend more mon­ey for pos­si­bly bet­ter results, you can use this gear list: 

[ninja_tables id=“6685”]

Keep in mind that while the gear in the sec­ond table is “bet­ter” that may not help enough to off­set the extra cost. I like doing things well, so I’ve basi­cal­ly used the sec­ond ver­sion, but it IS more expensive.

Build It

Build instruc­tions are straight­for­ward. I used Sime­onon­se­cu­ri­ty’s DeFli dual guide set­up the first time. Then I cut out the DeFLI set­up part and focused on Wing­bits for mine. If you don’t mind me assum­ing you know a bit about the Pi, here’s what to do: 

Start by “Reg­is­ter­ing an anten­na” on your Wing­bits account.

The ID will be the sta­tion name, some­thing like “super-secret-scor­pi­on”.

Next, we’ll turn to your Rasp­ber­ry Pi.

• Set up your Rasp­ber­ry Pi, con­nect­ing your SDR Navflight stick to the Pi using the USB exten­sion cable, then the SDR to your anten­na. If you bought the fil­ter, put that between the SDR stick and the Pi. It’ll look like this, from the top: Anten­na, fil­ter, SDR stick, USB exten­sion, Rasp­ber­ry Pi.
• Flash an SD card with Ras­pOS Lite. Use the Gear set­tings to enable SSH, set the host­name, and time­zone. Fancy.
• Insert the SD card in the Pi and pow­er it up.
• SSH in and run the com­mand found in your Wing­bits dash­board, some­thing like this:

curl -sL https://gitlab.com/wingbits/config/-/raw/master/download.sh | sudo bash

You’ll prob­a­bly find that the first time you run this code you’ll get an error at the end, some­thing like

vector is active. ?
readsb is inactive. Waiting 5 seconds...
readsb is still inactive.

Just reboot and install again. Yeah, I know, a lit­tle janky. Hope­ful­ly you won’t have to do this, but as of Novem­ber 5th 2023, that’s what I had to do. By the way, I was able to get mine work­ing on PoE with a split­ter that was 5V and 2.5A.

You’ll be asked for your “anten­na ID” once that fin­ish­es. You got the anten­na ID in the first step, remem­ber? It was some­thing like super-secret-scor­pi­on. Make sure you include the dashes!

• Set up your loca­tion using YOUR coor­di­nates, not the 33/-115 ones below. You can use Google Earth or latlong.net to find yours.

sudo readsb-set-location 33.67854 -115.12356

You CAN set auto­gain if you’d like, but I’d rec­om­mend against it.

Trou­bleshoot­ing isn’t par­tic­u­lar­ly easy or clear, and I’ve found that most times if you just check your con­nec­tions (Pi-Don­gle-anten­na) and then reboot a few times, it all works. 

Wei­de­hopfs Tar1090 and Graphs1090 are includ­ed, so you can see what’s work­ing by going to http://192.168.x.yy/tar1090 and http://192.168.x.yy/graphs1090 mak­ing sure to replace the .x.yy with what­ev­er your appro­pri­ate details are.

The Tar1090 is a cool local (host­ed on your Pi or what­ev­er com­put­er you use) inter­face to see what flights are being tracked. It’s fun to watch. It looks like this:

I’ve writ­ten up a tuto­r­i­al on how to get a lit­tle more out of Tar1090 than just the basic install, if you want to do that, go here.

Graphs1090 gives you some more stats to geek out on. If you want to go deep­er into it, check out this article.

I expect with­in the next few months we’ll sig­nif­i­cant improve­ments in both of these regard­ing test­ing anten­nas and setups and how it effects token earn­ings. Here you can see where I went offline for a few hours as I moved from a test rig inside on my desk up to the roof, with an accom­pa­ny­ing bump in stats.

Ok, that should do it! As a teas­er, I’ve heard that these things use 40–60 GB a month, so an off-grid set­up might be some­thing fun to explore, although as a long-last­ing solu­tion it’s prob­a­bly not the best move with cur­rent toke­nomics if your goal is to max­i­mize earnings. 

In the mean­time I’d strong­ly rec­om­mend join­ing the Wing­bits Dis­cord to learn more and stay up to date, please say “Hi” when you come in (I’m @gristleking in there). Huge thanks to @!simeononsecurity, @acci, and @gwosty on the Wing­bits Dis­cord for all their help with this. Now let’s track some aircraft!

Extra Credit for the Nerds

Air­space is bro­ken up into sev­er­al class­es; you can think of them as areas where there is more or less con­trol by “the tow­er”. Class A is the most restrict­ed, gen­er­al­ly begin­ning at 18,000′ above mean sea lev­el and up to 60,000′. This is where com­mer­cial air­lines, car­go oper­a­tors like FedEx, and high per­for­mance air­craft fly. 

ADS‑B is also required in Class B air­space (all around your busy air­ports) and Class C air­space (less busy airports).