Real-Time GPS Tracking Station

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GPS Satellites Tracker

v0.1.57 — Real-Time GPS Tracking Station

GPS SATELLITES<br>TRACKER

A real-time GPS satellite tracking dashboard using data from USB GPS Receivers<br>Docker containers and a lot of coffee and cake

Live Dashboard

Explore Features

Parquet Log Files Created

GB Total Data So Far

GPS Satellites Seen

Days to Build

Cups of Earl Grey

Cakes Consumed

Key Features

Real-Time Satellite Intelligence

A comprehensive GPS tracking dashboard with 3D globe visualisation, signal analysis, and real world satellite telemetry.

3D Globe View

Interactive Three.js globe displaying satellite positions, orbital paths, and real-time tracking with multiple camera perspectives, zoom and pan controls

Signal Analysis

Real-time SNR monitoring with bar charts, line plots, skyplot radar view, and historical sparkline telemetry for each satellite.

Satellite Directory

Browse all GPS satellites with spacecraft specifications, launch history, constellation block details, and real-time status.

Historical Playback

Time-travel through logged GPS data with a timeline slider, variable playback speeds, and frame-by-frame analysis.

Receiver Management

Track multiple GPS receiver locations simultaneously with coordinate display, error scatter plots, and CEP accuracy metrics.

Real-Time Telemetry

Live SSE streaming of GPS data with auto-refresh, instantaneous satellite position updates, and signal quality monitoring.

System Architecture

How It Works

A five-container architecture: USB serial data ingestion via MQTT, visualised through a Flask web frontend.

USB GPS Receiver

Cheap USB GPS module connected via serial port, outputting standard NMEA 0183 over serial.

Backend Pipeline

Raspberry Pi parsing NMEA data, computing satellite positions, and publishing structured telemetry to MQTT brokers.

Processing Service

Docker based Python processing service producing structured parquet files from the MQTT subscriptions

Web Dashboard

Modern Flask application serving Three.js 3D globe, DuckDB-powered Parquet queries, and SSE streaming for live updates.

Coming Soon

Build or buy a tracking device to stream your own telemetry and geo-location data directly to the server.

Future Hardware Support

Support for the battery powered LILYGO TTGO T-A7670G ESP32 based board with global 4G LTE and GPS.

Get Started

Try the Live Dashboard

Explore the full GPS tracking interface with real-time satellite data, 3D globe visualisation, and signal analysis tools.

Launch Live Dashboard

About

The Project

A weekend hobby project turned experiment in agentic coding — building a personal GPS tracking station from scratch.

Creator

Robert Wolf

Machine Learning Engineer

LinkedIn

Facebook

YouTube

[email protected]

System Information

Created Date:<br>8th June 2026

Software Version:<br>v0.1.57

Parquet Log Files:<br>46 files

Total Data Size:<br>7.24 MB

Date Coverage:<br>2026-06-09 to 2026-06-19

Receiver Location:<br>53.383&deg;N, 2.173&deg;W

The Story

Inspired by a recent Veritasium video on GPS jamming over Europe and Canada "Something is jamming GPS over Europe. Here's what we found", I decided to kick off a weekend hobby project to build a personal GPS tracking station. My goal wasn't just to log data, but to run an experiment in using agentic coding to help me.

I picked up a cheap USB GPS receiver, fired up my development server running TrueNAS SCALE, and used Google's Antigravity CLI to build a two-container architecture: a backend to ingest USB serial data, and a friendly web frontend. Within three hours and about 50 to 60 micro-revisions through the CLI, I had a working Docker container logging GPS data into hourly Parquet files. I never touched a single line of backend code in that first three house and the code quality was good.

Next up was the WebUI. I built it panel by panel, feature by feature completely through the Antigravity CLI. While the AI nailed vague prompts perfectly most of the time, it also went down some bizarre rabbit holes. I frequently had to step in as the "Senior Dev" to course-correct.

Out of the entire build, only a couple of bugs regarding the time slider defeated the agent, requiring me to step in and manually tweak the code.

I will be updating the website from time to time. If you have any problems please wait a few minutes as I'm probably updating the code and docker container behind the scenes.

Technology Stack

Python 3.13<br>Flask<br>Gunicorn<br>Three.js<br>DuckDB<br>Parquet<br>MQTT<br>Docker<br>TrueNAS SCALE<br>pynmea2<br>pyserial<br>Antigravity CLI<br>OpenCode<br>SSE<br>Orbitron UI<br>paho-mqtt<br>pyarrow

GPS-Tracker

Tracking Dashboard

A full-featured GPS satellite monitoring interface with three interconnected views: 3D globe, signal noise analysis, and satellite directory.

TACTICAL 3D

Orbital perspective with live satellite positions, orbital paths, and real-time tracking overlays

ERROR HEAT MAP

GPS accuracy error distribution with colour-coded heat overlay showing positional uncertainty zones

EARTH VIEW

Clean Earth perspective...

time satellite data real tracking dashboard

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