Context
Every time an airplane passes over us, I tend to open up flight radar to find out all the information about it. I use the application FlightRadar24 for this.
Welcome to SDR
SDR stands for Software Defined Radio.
RTL SDR
You can use a USB dongle to make a radio receiver from your laptop.A dongle with the RTL2832U chipset should do the trick. This chip can demodulate radio frequencies across a wide bandwith.
FlightRadar24 and SDR
The next thing we can do is to setup this all up for integration with flight radar.