GoKawiilPants for Birds is excited to introduce a new product in the ADSBee family of open-source ADS-B receivers: ADSBee 1421!
Background
In the past year, developers and enthusiasts have brought ADSBee 1090U’s open source aircraft tracking technology to a wide range of platforms, from airport ground stations to drones to weather balloons.
While working closely with some of our customers, we discovered that many applications have a need for an ultra low-power, low-cost ADS-B receiver tuned specifically for aircraft detect and avoid applications, without the need for the full feature set of ADSBee 1090U.
Simultaneously, Semtech released their fourth-generation LoRA IP on a chip called the LR2021, which includes a new high bit rate OOK reception RF frontend and demodulator. This new chip neatly containerizes an RF architecture that was previously implemented in custom discrete components (like in ADSBee 1090U and most other receivers) drastically shrinking both form factor and power dissipation required for receiving Mode S packets. Combined with a low power RF MCU, the LR2021 provides the perfect basis for a super small, low power, low cost dual-band ADS-B receiver. We already had the perfect candidate part for the RF MCU in TI’s CC1314, the next-generation iteration of the TI CC1312 that we use for receiving UAT (and soon, other sub-GHz aircraft tracking protocols), on the ADSBee 1090U.
At the beginning of 2026, we embarked on a design effort with these two MCUs, dubbing the combination “ADSBee 1421”, based on a concatenation of the constituent part numbers (TI CC1314 and LR 2021). In line with our existing part conventions, a la ADSBee m1090, we added an “m” to the beginning of our part to denote that it would be built as a solder-down module, for easy integration into any custom PCB design. Thus, the ADSBee m1421 was born!
Feature Set
ADSBee m1421 features dual-band ADS-B reception (Mode S and UAT), including support for UAT uplink protocols (TIS-B traffic / FIS-B weather). Perfect for mass and power constrained embedded applications, m1421 weighs less than 2 grams, draws less than 60mW of power, and features an ultra-small form factor of 23.4 x 14.5mm x 2.7mm.
ADSBee m1421’s firmware and schematic are open source under a GPL v3 license. All aircraft position decoding and tracking logic is unified with our widely adopted ADSBee 1090 firmware, and available for building in cloud CI.
Output protocols supported by ADSBee m1421 include GDL90, MAVLINK1, MAVLINK2, Aircraft JSON, CSBee, and raw packets, with more protocols to come!
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