But you’re seeing some, so that’s great!
What did you have to tweak with the image? Does buster just do this natively now?
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Piaware SD card image 3.8.0 (Buster) by default behaves as 1090 mhz only, though it has 978 mhz builtin, but 978mhz is inactive by default.
If you want to run 978mhz also, you will need 2nd dongle+antenna set to plug into RPi for 978mhz, serialize the two dongles, and issue few commands to activate 978mhz.
Howto : Piaware SD card image 3.8.0 Quickstart Guide
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abcd567 has got you covered for the setup.
Last few days have looked like this (I flashed a new card with the piaware image, so the data is only since Tuesday on these graphs). And antennas are indoors so I would expect much better if/when I put them outside.
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Yep. I have a pair of 978 and 1090 filtered/amplified receiver dongles from another project. That was exactly the plan. Thanks for the link, I couldn’t find it with a search.
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Max 3 UAT planes/day at Toronto
Today only 1 
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In Canada, that’s hardly surprising. Canada doesn’t recognize UAT as a valid ADS-B solution. UAT is really only going to be populated near municipal airports in the US.
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According to the FAA, in the US, about 30% of ADS-B OUT equipped GA aircraft use UAT. FlightAware is missing a lot of VFR flights since most receivers are 1090ES only.
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When the sun comes out (not very often these days), so do the GA-UAT aircraft. I like having a UAT receiver since a lot of them fly almost directly over me and now I can know who they are…
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While more 978 receivers can only be a good thing, you do need to be careful that “30% of equipped GA aircraft” does not mean “30% of equipped GA aircraft in the air”.
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I should have clarified. 30% of piston powered GA aircraft are equipped with UAT. I suspect that this is also a close approximation of how many VFR flights are being conducted with UAT ADS-B OUT. It’s frustrating that FlightAware is missing out on this much VFR traffic. It would be nice if the default piAware receiver configurations were dual frequency.
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Unfortunately that would require two dongles and the user would need to serialize the dongles to identify 978 vs 1090; that’s not great as a default config. You can definitely set it up via just config changes + serialization if you do have two dongles.
It’s not technically feasible to receive both 978 and 1090 at the same time on a single rtlsdr dongle.
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It is very easy and simple to change configuration from default (1090 only) to dual (1090 + 978), but as @obj has already pointed out, it requires two dongles (one for 1090 other for 978)
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How about non PiAware SD card image setups? I tried to run those command to add my 2nd dongle for UAT and it was returned an error “option only supported on PiAware SD card images”.
Appreciate your time.
Trevor
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For Piaware+dump1090-fa package install on Raspbian OS, you have to first install dump978-fa and after that configure. See below:
(1) Install dump978-fa
wget https://flightaware.com/adsb/piaware/files/packages/pool/piaware/p/piaware-support/piaware-repository_4.0_all.deb
sudo dpkg -i piaware-repository_4.0_all.deb
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install dump978-fa
(2) Configure
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2020: My site would see above 4500 aircraft on 1090 and around 50 on 978 on a good day.
2022: The 1090 stats are about the same, but the 978 count now is up to 150 some VFR days.
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Above is out-dated (valid before ver 6.1). From ver 6.1 onwards, use this:
(3.3.4.2) - Configure dump1090-fa & dump978-fa to use dongles of assigned serial numbers
sudo piaware-config uat-receiver-type sdr
sudo sed -i 's/^RECEIVER_SERIAL=.*/RECEIVER_SERIAL=00001090/' /etc/default/dump1090-fa
sudo sed -i 's/driver=rtlsdr[^ ]* /driver=rtlsdr,serial=00000978 /' /etc/default/dump978-fa
# Reboot Pi to implement configuration settings
sudo reboot
Most excellent discussion…
I’m trying to decide if I should attempt to add UAT / 978 to my existing RPi (with the appropriate dongle and outdoor antenna), or set up another Pi exclusively for 978.
Hate to say money is no object, but it’s cheap compared to time and headache spent tweaking my 1090 system that already works.
My rationale is that there are a non-trivial number of local flights that don’t show up - may be 978 broadcasts I’m not getting, or may be local cowboys who aren’t transmitting at all. Just interesting.
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If you are using a Flightaware blue or yellow dongle, you can add a second UAT receiver to the system and improve your stats. The UAT receiver adds more traffic on the Pi computer USB circuits but does not load the system down significantly.
If you have an Airspy R2 or Mini, then things get more complicated. The Airspy receivers are heavy users of the USB connection and MLAT reception will likely be affected or stopped if you add an additional UAT dongle due to the MLAT timing requirements. Happened to me while testing a Pi4/4GB Airspy R2 and UAT receiver together.
The Pi5 seems to have different USB systems and may work better than the Pi4. Hmmmm, makes me wonder if I need to order a Pi5 and do a bit of experimentation. Always seems something needs to be tweaked, changed, or updated here.
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I was in the same boat as you. Had a lot of GA folks not showing up on ES 1090.
I set up a separate rig on UAT 978 and started picking them up. Make sure you enable TIS-B and you’ll pick up much more on UAT rig. Good luck,
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Right??!
The other kink is that I’m kind of in a basin with no other station reporting 978, so I think it’s a bit of a blind spot. While I’m sure there are vintage and “experimental” flights either entirely without ADSB or with it switched off, I don’t that it amounts to that much.
I’ll for sure look into to the TIS-B aspect. Thanks!
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