Plane Spotters / Flight Radar Thread

Hi,

Sorry for the thread revival but I've been building an ADSB receiver and its been a really fun project, I hope that some of you guys might still be around to discuss it with.

I'm using a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B with the Flight Aware Pro Stick (the blue one) and a 200mm 2.4ghz dipole antenna for now. I'm running the latest version of dump1090-mutability, for now it is just placed inside on my desk while I get it all up and running. Eventually I'll probably get the 26 inch FA antenna and either put it in the loft or just above the roof at the back of the house, I'll see how the loft goes first. Once this is up and running I'd also like to try a similar project to feed AIS data to marine traffic.

I've had the receiver up and running for about a week and I am averaging about 900 aircraft and 40,000 positions a day, this is just from bring placed on my desk on the second floor of the house.

This is the current coverage map from planefinder:


And this is the dump1090 map with the standard distance markings and theoretical range data added from heywhatsthat at 10, 20, 30 and 40k feet:


I'm feeding flight aware, fr24 and planefinder and I think I'm feeding ADSB exchange but I've not found any way of confirming that.

Having slight trouble with FR24 in the last couple of days. At around midday on monday I seemed to have some sort of crash where all feeders stopped and the dump1090 map showed no targets. I ran the following, and things appeared to go back to normal so I left it:
Code: 
sudo /etc/init.d/dump1090-mutability restart
You can see the slight blip reflected on the FA stats page:



However at about 1pm today I looked in more detail at my stats it appears that my FR24 feeder did not come back up from that crash. So today I ran
Code: 
sudo service fr24feed restart
this seemed to have no effect so again I followed it up with the above global restart command used on Monday.



As you can see this had some sort of affect as it generated the yellow line on the FR24 timeline and the uptime percentage started to rise slowly from zero but its still showing the status as offline and no position reports.

Does anyone know what is wrong with my FR24 feeder? Once I've got that back online I need to work out ADSB exchange. Then I can start playing about with antennas and positioning.

Thanks
 
Feek said:
I was going to build a large collinear to slap outside but decided to buy something pre-built instead and so while waiting for that to arrive, I built a small quarterwave groundplane vertical which I've got hanging from the curtain rail with some cable ties.

spider-20161105-164154.jpg
Click to expand...

I've got the FlightAware Pro stick plus on the way and wanted to try a quick and cheap antenna before I spend any more money. Have you got any build instructions for that setup?
 
Resolved the above issue with the FR24 feeder by rerunning the FR24 sign up process and supplying the existing sharing key, after a further reboot it then came up.

Ordered the 26 inch antenna to test.
 
I've got the FlightAware 26" antenna, but it's located low down in the conservatory, it's "blocked" by the house in the SW direction and there's another house about 20 yards away to the east.
I need to get in the loft and see if there's any power up there I can use.
 
Well I'm on the map now!
jk6YFtc.jpg
Compared to the above output of my receiver I'm getting far less local output than 360radar. Why would stuff close to me show up on 360radar and other shared sites, but not be picked up by my receiver?
 
Im a novice but the ones that are close to you but not visible on your reciever, are they at low altitude? Are they in a particular direction relative to you?

Have you done the "heywhatsthat" thing to see the theoretical best range based on the land and obstacles around you? You can do this at different heights and it might show that you're not going to detect below a certain height in a certain area.
 
Feek said:
Yup, the new Pro Stick Plus. They've just appointed a UK reseller for them so they're now easily available over here without having to risk them getting delayed by customs along with the associated costs.

I made a blog post yesterday comparing internal and external aerials, you might find it interesting to read.
Click to expand...
Where did you get your enamelled copper from? What diameter is it?
 
@Luke
Either of these will do you. I used the one on the left, it's not quite so easy to work with as you need to remove the enamel before soldering but it's better because if you inadvertently touch any of the coil windings together, it's insulated so it doesn't really matter.

f0j1vIk.jpeg

If you work out how much you need, I don't mind winding some off for you and sticking it in the post.
 
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