Plane Spotters / Flight Radar Thread

xdcx said:
On the coast to the West of RAF Lossiemouth here so we occasionally have Typhoon's overhead and previously GR4's constantly but not so much these days.
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When I was in primary school out near Loch Ness we used to get jets passing quite low overhead at least 3-4 times a day. Dont see it much at all these days - possibly due to RAF Kinloss shutting down?

I like following the SAR helicopter too. Used to be able to track the Seaking out of RAF Kinloss on flightradar but it changed over to the bigger Sikorsky S92 based at Dalcross and I couldnt find it on flight tracking.
I've now worked out that I can track it on http://www.marinetraffic.com/ because it shows up as a coastguard vessel. Any time it heads south from Dalcross it flies right over the top of my office so I usually stick the tracker on and see where it's heading to.
 
I love this stuff.

I get to see the A400M Atlas and RAF Voyager out of RAF Brize Norton over my village.

The Thomson Dreamliner will be operating out of Bristol for Transatlantic holiday destinations.

If you dig a little deeper, you can jump onto the NATS website to download the PDFs showing the SIDS/STARS and watch the planes follow the departure procedure out of UK airfields.
 
touch said:
When I was in primary school out near Loch Ness we used to get jets passing quite low overhead at least 3-4 times a day. Dont see it much at all these days - possibly due to RAF Kinloss shutting down?

I like following the SAR helicopter too. Used to be able to track the Seaking out of RAF Kinloss on flightradar but it changed over to the bigger Sikorsky S92 based at Dalcross and I couldnt find it on flight tracking.
I've now worked out that I can track it on http://www.marinetraffic.com/ because it shows up as a coastguard vessel. Any time it heads south from Dalcross it flies right over the top of my office so I usually stick the tracker on and see where it's heading to.
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Kinloss didn't host fast jets I don't believe it was the Nimrod squadrons there but they did host exercises every year and had all sorts from all over the world :) Back when you were a boy, MANY years ago, it was probably GR4 Tornados you seen a lot of but they don't have such a large squadron at Lossie now, it's a reserve squadron. Weirdly don't see so many Typhoons over this way :( Removal of GR4 squadrons from RAF Leuchars will have impacted too despite it being down in Fife they would carry out exercises up Pitlochry/West Coast/Tain.

Funny as the Dalcross chopper was hover about over Dingwall for an hour the other night and I was getting annoyed as nothing was showing on FR :P I will go on Marine Traffic next time!
 
!bluetonic! said:
The Thomson Dreamliner will be operating out of Bristol for Transatlantic holiday destinations.
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Arrr really? Will be good for Bristol!

Leek is not a bad place to spot aircraft coming in and out of Manchester. Sometimes we are right in the flight path and often see the Thompson 787s, PIA and Emirates 777s and the Emirates A380 coming in on it's evening landing from Dubai.
 
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Scuzi said:
Last I seen of it on radar it was FL680 and climbing :eek:
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Reminds me of listening to the Lightning when it finished the display at North Weald many years ago.

The conversation was something like

"Lightning at 2,000 ft, request clearance to 10,000"

"Cleared to 10,000".

"Thanks, leaving 2,000" *half a beat later* "and level at 10,000".
 
Cosimo said:
Which receiver are you using?
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A very cheap setup :

NooElec NESDR Mini 2 USB RTL-SDR & ADS-B Receiver, RTL2832U & R820T2 Tuner with a cheap telescopic aerial. The range is fairly decent but I need a better fixed aerial which I haven't got round to getting purchased and setup.

I run an old HP AMD E450 netbook running Windows 10 with an old Crucal SSD installed. Running Virtual Radar, M-Lat data sharing software feeding into 360radar etc..

For audio reception, Yaesu handheld with 8.33khz spacing.
 
I'm a pilot, even when I've done a long haul flight and land at 5am I still look at planes and whip out flight radar to see where they are coming from.
 
I think everything is on the way for this now.
Pi3
RTL-SDR Blog R820T2 RTL2832U (1PPM TCXO) to replace the very old one I've got which was well off frequency and drifted all over the place.
Uputronics preamp/SAW filter
BS-1105 aerial from Chris at Taylor Made RF. I was going to build an aerial but after having had a shufti around, decided on one of these instead.

I'll sort out the interconnects once everything turns up. Will initially upload to FlightAware and probably add FlightRadar24 as well.
 
If you're building these things with a Pi then the DIN rail cases you can get for them are a nice way of mounting it all out of the way.
 
Saw two planes flying relatively side by side about a month ago, looked like passenger jets too. Never seen it before and wish I'd had my binauculars at the time.
 
Here's what I've done.

I've got an RTL SDR dongle that I bought a couple of years ago.

rtl-20161106-202914.jpg

I'm still waiting for the newer SDR dongle to turn up and that should just be a straight swap. I don't know if I'll really notice any difference.

I've plugged that into a Raspberry Pi3 and installed the software from the ADS-B Receiver Project.

I knew that a bandpass filter would be a good addition and so I chose a combined filter/preamp

preamp-20161106-203423.jpg


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


"How's it working?" I hear you ask.

"Really well. Surprisingly well for an indoor aerial" is my reply.

tracker-20161106-203909.jpg


That's a grab from earlier this afternoon with over 90 aircraft being monitored. The window is oriented roughly south east and that's very clear from what I'm seeing but considering the aerial is just a quarterwave indoors, it's doing really well. I'm getting reception from aircraft over 200nm away with the odd handful over 250nm coming through.

I've received signals today from over 1,750 aircraft.
 
Feek said:
Here's what I've done.

I've got an RTL SDR dongle that I bought a couple of years ago.

rtl-20161106-202914.jpg

I'm still waiting for the newer SDR dongle to turn up and that should just be a straight swap. I don't know if I'll really notice any difference.

I've plugged that into a Raspberry Pi3 and installed the software from the ADS-B Receiver Project.

I knew that a bandpass filter would be a good addition and so I chose a combined filter/preamp

preamp-20161106-203423.jpg


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


"How's it working?" I hear you ask.

"Really well. Surprisingly well for an indoor aerial" is my reply.

tracker-20161106-203909.jpg


That's a grab from earlier this afternoon with over 90 aircraft being monitored. The window is oriented roughly south east and that's very clear from what I'm seeing but considering the aerial is just a quarterwave indoors, it's doing really well. I'm getting reception from aircraft over 200nm away with the odd handful over 250nm coming through.

I've received signals today from over 1,750 aircraft.
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I might have to do a bit of research into those PI setups and images. The antenna and filter/amp combo seems to be working very well.
 
It's really easy using the script I've linked to. It took about an hour to do everything but that's only because it was a new Pi build and I did an OS update to start with.
 
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