During testing we noticed the same thing with the CHIP. Power and Wifi problems are quite normal for first version boards. The original RPi had many similar problems.
The Raspberry Pi Zero W is a $10 board that doesn’t require anything special. It basically competes directly with the CHIP in features and price. Also the standard PiAware image file will work with the RPi Zero W so setup is super easy. Our Zero W test unit has been running for months and the wifi is very good.
If you want to check cpu usage you can use “top” or “ps aux”.
Thanks for useful info, I have RPi zero but without wireless and BT, using it in another project for now 
Also found that power limit of AXP209 chip can be “unlocked” with command axp209 --no-limit or i2cset -y -f 0x34 0x30 0x63 so it can use more than limited 500mA. Not good idea to plugging it on computer, USB port cannot deliver that much power but if used with adapter 1,5 A or more it will be ok. There is even a script for this (github.com/fordsfords/axp209-no … e/gh-pages)
I googled for CPU monitoring and found **htop **that is ok, I was thinking of some logging tool that I can use to see in past if there was high CPU demands, but this is ok for now.
Currently dump1090 is using about ~35% and other processes occasionally take additional ~5% so in total average around ~40%.
Next i will experiment with some LNA, homemade filter and antennas. I found so much useful info on this forum but not too much spare time 
MY C.H.i.P. computer was laying in my drawer unused since I got it in Nov. 2016 because it turned itself off shortly after start when a DVB-T was plugged in. The reason is that C.H.I.P. by default has a limit set for power it can draw from power supply (950 mA). This seemed to be protection for Laptop if C.H.I.P. was connected to it by the USB Cable.
Since I do not connect CHIP to Laptop through USB Cable, and power CHIP by a 2A power supply adapter, my C.H.I.P. does not need this protection.
Last night I found that this limit can be removed in a very simple way. I gave following commands to the C.H.I.P., and that did the magic. The C.H.I.P. is no more crashing, and feeding Flightaware, Planefinder, Flightradar24, Adsbexchange, and RadarBox24.
sudo axp209 --no-limit
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo systemctl enable no-limit
This is the page from where I found above workaround.
I have used a C.H.I.P. with the AXP209 --no-limit tweak for a PiAware site, but found that a near identical (Debian, manual PiAware installation) RaspberryPi 3 setup in the same location, with the same antenna and same radio, yielded better stats.
Purely anecdotal at this stage, I haven’t had the time to do a more quantified comparison.
