This past Monday, April 25, 2016, I moved the antenna on my Babylon, NY receiver over and up about 15 feet to the top of the two story office building I work in. The landlord installed a permanent ladder to the top of the building a few months ago which finally made it possible for me to get up to the upper roof. Previously the antenna was at the side of the building on a lower adjoining roof and coverage to the west and northwest was extremely attenuated due to the side of the building blocking signals. I was receiving approximately 80,000 ADS-B reports a day in the previous location. Now with the new location, I am seeing aircraft out to 150nmi and I am getting 200,000+ ADS-B reports a day (total reports have almost doubled to 600,000). It is amazing how such a relatively minor change in the antenna location has made such a dramatic change in coverage. As I am located pretty close to Great South Bay and the terrain is relatively flat for many miles, it provides a relatively unobstructed radio view out to the horizon.
Sadly my days are probably numbered at this location as my firm is all but out of business. I wish I could have put this antenna where it is now back in 2013 when I first installed it. Combined with my north shore receiver, my metro NYC area coverage is very good.
The antenna is located in the center of the following photo at the top of the roof where the four air conditioning pipes are located at the roof’s edge.
IMG_6050 | ADS-B Antenna on building in Babylon, NY | Zzznorch | Flickr https://flic.kr/p/GHW9PV
Would it be worth approaching your town’s council to see if you could put your feeder on one of their buildings?
You could just use a short TV mast (couple of feet) with a couple of concrete bricks to weigh it down. Mount the Pi right at the antenna to get rid of cable losses as well as eliminating any issues around running cables within the building. A Raspberry Pi uses next to no power. But if they were worried about power consumption then maybe a solar powered Pi? Many government buildings have free wifi internet (at least around here they do) so you could set it up and leave it.
You would probably have to emphasise the benefits to the community and the altruistic nature of the endeavour. 
Maybe add a web cam to the set up and sell them on the idea by pitching it as a tourism generator. “If people could only see how pretty our town is they would want to visit and spend heaps of money in the local businesses.” 
This is a “village” and they are a bit more restrictive in zoning than the larger “town” type governments we have here in New York (example: there are no Starbucks, Dunkin’ Donuts or any other type of fast food shops here as village code requires all restaurants to have wait staff - it is that kind of place). The other issue is this work location is 24 miles from my home. If I am no longer working here, it is an awfully long drive down Long Island to check up on it. I might be able to move it to my sisters home near KFRG but the foliage would be problematic for it and I do not think they would be too crazy to have me put up a small antenna and run coax into the house. They may also be moving out of state within the year due to a job transfer so that would eliminate that site too.
The new antenna location did present one additional problem. The increase in range and aircraft seen increase the load on dump1090 on my original Raspberry Pi. Between dump1090 running and the FlightAware software, I was hitting 100% CPU usage and my FlightAware status page was warning me about excessive CPU usage. I upgraded to a Raspberry Pi 3 on Monday and CPU usage is much less now with the four CPU’s sharing the load.
There’s always a roof somewhere, just a matter of finding it. 
I had to upgrade my Raspberry Pi as well. Adding a Plane Finder client and Webmin to the existing Flightaware and FR24 set up was a bridge too far. Intermittent 100% CPU spikes.
Going from a single core Pi to a quad core Pi is a huge difference. Lots of spare CPU now, just have to figure out the best way to make use of it.
I am leaning towards adding an all sky camera. Too many projects, must learn to focus…
LOL! Yes, same problems as me with my Pi. I run FADump1090, the FlightAware feeder with the MLAT client and a feeder to Flight Radar 24. Plus I have mjpg_streamer running with a camera aimed out the back office window. That all worked fine on the classic Raspberry and CPU ran about 80%. Once I put the antenna up higher, the increased flight traffic received by dump1090, combined with the additional processing of the feeder processes, had the CPU running at a steady 100% and FlightAware kept reporting the anomaly on my ADS-B statistics page. Idle is now around 88% averaged across all four CPU’s according to iostat. I can now even Remote Desktop into the device with xrdp running and the desktop is smooth in its response. I paid $29.95 + tax for my Pi 3 at my local MicroCenter and it was worth every penny. I suspect I will have a bunch of used classic Pi’s sitting in a box when I am finished upgrading.
