Many years ago, Kinetics Avionics Ltd produce the world's first ADSB box the SBS-1. As technology improved so did their range of products the SBS 1ER and the SBS-3. Unfortunately for the end user Kinetics decided to cease production of their SBS ADSB boxes. Kinetics had designed a PUCK SDR and a Trilby Hat. I don't think the last two products were as sucessful as their SBS ADSB boxes. Hopefully Kinetics will start production of their boxes but it's highly doubtful. Time will tell. These boxes are being out performed by little RTL SDR 820T2 SDR dongles and RTLSDR software (in various flavours). Eventually the SBS ADSB boxes will become highly sought after. On a good day, all being well you may purchase a decent second hand SBS1 for just over £200 on Ebay .
An alternative to the range of Kinetics ADSB hardware is either SDR dongles tuned in to 1090mhz or acars frequencies or hardware supplied by AirNav®RadarBox.
ADSB is being developed more and more, aircraft will be able to transmit their positions over vast oceans and seas, satellites will relay the information to air traffic controllers and transmit back to them a new altitude or speed. Airspace is becoming heavily congested, dangerous, unsafe so new ways of fitting more aircraft and flights in the same space is a logical assumption and the next step. For more information on space adsb check out Nav Canada blog.
To view a list of flights around the globe check this site out global adsbexchange .
ON the left is a screen capture of SBSplotter, it show the distance plotted of each aircraft at it's distance away from my home location. As you can see the best is 153.5 nautical miles from me. That distance was obtained by making a home made collinear antenna and sticking it out of a window because I'm not allowed to have a fixed antenna up. Unfortunately my best distance (which I didn't capture) is 701.4 nautical miles. You may download a copy of SBSplotter from my server.
I mentioned virtual radar on my software page very briefly, this software is one of the best I've seen for a Kinetics SBS. It has a brilliant interface and works exceptionally well, much more pleasing to watch rather than the bog standard map that is supplied with the SBS software. OK, you have to use the basestation.exe to connect and run in the background which is a pity but it's either that or nothing.
The virtual radar is well worth having, one of the settings I prefer is a "moving map" to watch an aircraft pop up and navigate their route. Virtual Radar is a serious piece of software to have for your Kinetics SBS1-3, you may download the latest version using my link.
A very useful piece of software is squawkbox which will decode what the squawk code means for an aircraft, it is an essential piece of software to make full use of your financial investment in your Kinetics SBS1-3. Squawkbox will decode codes from the UK, USA, Canada, Turkey, Holland, Australia, New Zealand. You may download Squawkbox from my server.
If you have viewed my software page previously, you will have noticed that I mentioned acarsd. Acarsd were working on a new release of their software which was specifically modified to accomodate the Kinetics SBS1-3 hardware decoder. Unfortunately acarsd 1.70R3 is now like hens teeth and very hard to find on the internet. It is almost identical to version 1.60 or 165 with the exception of all the hard work of setting it up for your Kinetics SBS has been done for you. You may download a copy of acarsd 1.70R3 from my server.