The story of Stratux: ten years of open-source ADS-B

In August 2015, a pilot posted on Reddit's r/flying about something that shouldn't have been possible on a hobby budget: a Raspberry Pi and a cheap software-defined radio, receiving free ADS-B weather and feeding it to ForeFlight. It was open source from that very first post. Ten years later, Stratux is a dual-band receiver used by pilots across North America, Europe and beyond, and it's still built in the open by its community.

A Raspberry Pi and a radio (2015)

Christopher Young (cyoung) shared the original build in August 2015. It listened on 978 MHz only, with a single SDR: enough to pull down FIS-B weather from FAA ground stations. It was open source from the first post.

Within days the community was building on it. On August 13, 2015, Helno demonstrated a 1090-only build at the UPA AGM in Ontario, using pre-release code from cyoung. Canada had no UAT ground stations then, so 1090 MHz traffic was what mattered there. The r/stratux subreddit was created the same day.

1090ES support landed on GitHub in early September, and on September 16, 2015, v0.2r1 became the first official dual-band (978 + 1090) Stratux release.

Getting noticed (2016)

In February 2016, Aviation Consumer reviewed Stratux, the first major aviation publication to cover it. It praised how Stratux worked with every major EFB, and its photos showed one of Helno's community-designed cases.

From 3D prints to a real case (2016–2017)

Early receivers lived in whatever builders could make: 3D-printed designs shared by the community, then laser-cut acrylic. Helno designed and refined printable cases through many generations, with Dan (dmurray14) printing early prototypes and working on antennas.

In 2017 that work became the white injection-molded case that's still the standard today. Helno told the story himself in Getting cases injection molded. Around the same time, cyoung was benchmarking radios to find cooler, lower-power SDRs: New low power v2 SDRs and comparisons.

A community project (2020 onward)

Around 2020, cyoung stepped back, and the community carried the project forward. Adrian Batzill (b3nn0) kept the Europe Edition alive and growing for years, adding FLARM and OGN support for European pilots, with contributors like VirusPilot improving GPS handling.

Support kept spreading: on March 26, 2022, Garmin Pilot officially added Stratux support.

One Stratux for everyone (2025)

In February 2025, Stratux v2.0 brought the US and European versions together as a single image with a region setting, developed at github.com/stratux/stratux. Much of the v2.0 work came from contributors including chmorgan and jamez70. It modernized the build system and packaging and added support for new receiver hardware. Development continues with v2.0 pre-releases.

Why it mattered

Before Stratux, a dual-band portable receiver was a significant purchase. Open source didn't make commercial receivers disappear; it changed what they had to cost, and it gave pilots a receiver they could build, understand, repair and improve themselves. That's still the point.

Thank you

Stratux exists because of hundreds of contributors: developers, testers, case and antenna designers, people who answer questions on Discord at midnight, and pilots who report bugs from the cockpit. A few names from the early days and today: cyoung, Helno, dmurray14, peepsnet, felixk, mbliu, Axtel4, b3nn0, schnuppepampe, VirusPilot, chmorgan, jamez70, and many more.

Want to be part of the next ten years? Join the community.