Plane Spotters / Flight Radar Thread

Thanks. Did you just take 5v DC from the GPIO?

RTL SDR v3 and LNA arrived. Had to mutilate the ADSB Reciever Project installation scripts a fair bit to get around a few obstacles on Buster.

Can detect aircraft for around 10 mins. After that the GUI shows an error that dump 1090 is no longer running and the Pi goes unresponsive on SSH.

Was using the bias tee on the dongle for now. Deactivated it and took the LNA out of the loop. Same symptoms. rtl_test detects the dongle ok.

Might start all over again and load Jessie. If it persists I guess there is a hardware issue.
 
Cleared everything down from the Buster installation and rebuilt on Stretch 9.9 instead.

Issues with going unresponsive persisted. Logs showed it was down to the wireless lan going down. All of my other PIs use wired lan. This probably will when it's in its final location. Anyway turned off power saving on the wlan adapter. Didn't work. Set up a job to ping my router every 60 seconds and that seems to be working. Also set up a second job to poll the adapter status and reconnect if the network is found to be down. That hasn't been triggered yet so the ping job seems to be keeping the connection alive.

Wish I had kept it on Buster and done a bit more testing now but with having to fiddle a few of the install scripts for Buster specific issues it was logical to rule out having broken anything there.

RTL-SDRV3 and LNA are performing around 20% better than the FA pro stick and Uputronics LNA despite being one storey lower for the moment.

FA setup is in the loft, RTL setup is just at the bedroom window for now.

Interestingly they have different area coverage at the moment. From here in North Wales both cover a sort of Arc through Exeter, London and just off the Norwich coast.

The FA pro stick gets South Wales and the Irish Sea.

The RTL-SDRV3 gets the English Channel and a small patch over Calais.

Some of that will obviously be positional. Need to get them both up in the loft together to do a direct comparison now that the new one seems stable.

If there's any benefit from keeping both, either different sides of the loft or one indoor one outdoor then I'll do that. If not then I'll ship the loser off to a family member. Either in Liverpool which is only about 20 miles away or in Edinburgh which obviously would be better but it depends who is willing.

Lake District is a brick wall for me so Edinburgh would be good even if it just sat in a window.

P.S. still on the inbuilt bias tee - seems ok so far.
 
@Feek Yeah I'd be happy to do that once the setup is complete and stable.

My location probably complements yours quite well.

I like the idea of sharing towards something independent.
 
Nazbit said:
@Feek Yeah I'd be happy to do that once the setup is complete and stable.

My location probably complements yours quite well.

I like the idea of sharing towards something independent.
Click to expand...
Excellent, thanks and I think you're right. From the description of where you are and what you can see, I think it'll fit in very nicely.
 
Some of these plots look like art..... Great stuff! :)
A few updates:
I have a good performance considering the 8m of H155 coax between antenna and the Blue FA stick. But there's always room for improvement :D
By using the RTL-SDR V3 as a spectrum analyser (with Spektrum), I found out that the spectrum around here is polluted with very strong signals on FM broadcast (100kW transmitter at 10 km), VHF (mainly DAB), UHF (DVB-T, GSM).

Currently, I'm waiting for new parts to improve my ADS-B reception a little.
From top to bottom: I ordered this antenna on Ebay, (Stanislav offered me a good price), 3 metres of .400 cable (M&P Hyperflex 10) and this cavity filter. I chose the wideband (20MHz) version to tackle possible frequency drift due to changing temperatures. Plus, the filter is DC shorted, which gives some ESD protection.

My intention is to place the equipment (filters, LNA's, etc) in a weatherproof box at approx 1m75 on the 4m50 pole. From the box a cable (USB or coax) goes to the RPI in attic, which is at it shortest <3m cable length from the box. Two other cables go to my shack. The main reason I put the box at 1m75 and not on the top of the mast, is because it is not so easy to take the mast down on my own due to a permanent shoulder injury, which restricts me.
 
@Feek
Dear Feek,
In a few months from now I'm allowed to put up a site on top of a building with free view around on this location. The set up will be quite similar to the Martello Tower that you and Tony build but with a cavity filter instead of the Uputronics filter/LNA. I will be building the site with a very close friend of mine (known him for 40 years). We both follow the course at our local VERON department for our full license.

I wanted to ask you a few things:
-Which POE extractor did you use to feed the Pi and LNA?
-Would you recommend using a Pi4 or just stick with a Pi3b?
-Which LNA would you recommend when using a cavity filter? A wideband LNA4ALL/Uputronics?

Sorry for the bulk load of questions, but I hope the answers will also be helpfull for others in addition to your blog.

Since Saturday the 14th around noon I noticed a little performance drop on your site, is the hexbeam back on top again?
 
@NLPD1S
Sorry for the delay in replying, I've had a lot going on recently which has kept me from the forums.

That looks very good and I'm really keen to see what your results are like. If it's possible, it would be awesome if I could add your site to my essexradar VRS instance as that'll give me fantastic coverage over to the east as well. Are you likely to have spare bandwidth, do you reckon that's possible?

To answer your questions as best I can. I don't know what make the PoE module is, it's a generic cheap model that was given to me by a friend. I will look when I'm home (as I'm on holiday in GU-Land right now) and see if it's got any labels on it but it works and it works well. I'm feeding the 9V output into a £1 DC-DC voltage converter from eBay which I've set to around 5.2v and I feed that into the Pi. I've soldered a wire from the 5v GPIO pins to the bias-tee injector which is what's powering the RTL-SDR LNA.

If you can use a Pi4 then absolutely you should go for it. It can handle the Airspy at 20MHz which is better than the 12MHz maximum you'll get with a Pi3B+
Personally, I'm not a fan of the Uputronics LNA because I've seen how badly 2m can totally kill the front end. I'd go with the RTL-SDR LNA every time.

Finally - Yes, check my blog and you'll see that the Hex has gone back up and my feeder has been lowered down again. It's only temporary though as I'll be putting a new FA aerial back on top.
 
Hi,

I’ve got a Pi 3 b+ running Flight Aware, using the antenna in the link with a 5m cable. Also an Uptronics Preamp coupled to a NooElec NESDR SMArTee v2. Currently mounted in my loft right in the middle and as high as I can go. Other than going outside what else can I do to make it better?

Live stats are here http://212.159.5.208:444/dump1090-fa/

https://www.lowflyingwales.co.uk/store/product/internal-ads-b-antenna/

https://store.uputronics.com/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=50

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B079C3FHPG/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_Qb6MDbP80YJFS
 
The Airspy Mini is £120, not £210.
Realistically, moving the aerial outside will most likely make a huge difference.
I'm not a massive fan of the Uputronics LNA though, I think the RTL-SDR LNA is a better option.
 
Feek said:
The Airspy Mini is £120, not £210.
Realistically, moving the aerial outside will most likely make a huge difference.
I'm not a massive fan of the Uputronics LNA though, I think the RTL-SDR LNA is a better option.
Click to expand...

Sorry was v2 I was looking at. I see there is 2 options. Which would you recommend? Ideally need to get a 2” dia, 6ft alloy pole. Have a bracket already fitted.
 
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