I have a home office PC in a server rack that is on 24/7/365 with multiple pipes to the Internet as well as battery backups.
Do I have to use the Raspberry Pi and PiAware or can I do all of this from my PC?
Thanks
You need to run piaware to do the FA-upload-and-mlat parts, but it doesn’t have to run on a Pi (despite the name).
The prebuilt packages are only built for Raspbian but it should be fairly easy to build from source on anything debian-like, or with a little more trouble anything POSIX-ish.
You’ll also need a copy of dump1090 or some other way to receive your ADS-B data (again, dump1090 should be easy to build on anything POSIX-ish)
See github.com/flightaware/piaware_builder as starting points
Hmm - might be a good use-case for docker. I’ve never set this up so I can’t tell you if the docker vm would be able to talk to the USB port - although if it couldn’t, you could run a demodulator on the windows side and feed raw data to piaware running in the docker VM methinks.
Pure speculation though.
Just my 2 cents, just get a PI. 50 Bucks and be done with it. You can run Virtual Server on your PC if you like for more umph off the pi