Next week I will be on an Island of the Azores and I’ve noticed that most flight tracking sites (apart from the commercial ones) have no or just coastal coverage of the northern Atlantic.
I recently got into the whole ADS-B SDR rabbit hole and got some basic equipment to run a “node”:
RTL-SDR
Nooelec LNA+Filter für 1090Mhz
Raspberry Pi 4B
Telescopic Dipol Kit Antenna
The Ali Express PCB Antenna
Wires and connectors to make a DIY Spider
nanoVNA H4
Now I will be there for 4 weeks and I plan to make use of this prime location for north Atlantic coverage. Currently I’m running stream1090 + readsb + graph1090 and that works great but now shortly before I head out there I thought I’d ask for any suggestions, recommendations, ideas etc for making the most of this setup with max range probably being the most interesting. But feel free to add requests for data samples etc.
I’ll investigate whether I can maybe leave the Pi running there throughout the year - if not I’d be able to catch ADS-B (and AIS I suppose) for about 4 weeks.
I have already plans but since I’m just a few weeks in that rabbit hole any input is appreciated
A few years ago i had a friend and his wife go to live on Cocas Keeling Island in the Indian ocean. They were there for a year and i sent them a Pi3 with a generic RTL-SDR receiver, a pcb dipole in a pvc tube, some coax and a power supply. He plugged it into his internet router and mounted the antenna on the side of the house.
Cocas Keeling is a waypoint on one of the tracks from the Gulf States to Australia and on average there were about 10 commercial flights and a handful of military and border patrol flights a day within range.
No other stations within about 500km so no MLAT.
As it was one of very few such isolated receivers it found a few bugs in the system such as one where the first plane in the list wasn’t reported. It took a while to convince flightaware that i could see it and that there were no other stations around that could report it.
Lot’s of other interesting things to watch in such an isolated location.
Back then there was no remote access like raspberry connect or vnc or tailscale to allow me to log in remotely but that is all available now.
My best advice is to keep it simple and robust, don’t be too ambitious and if you leave it there make certain you can remotely access it.
I’ve wondered in the past about taking an ADS-B on a cruise ship (or on any vacation, really). I wouldn’t pay for the ridiculously slow internet on the ship, but being able to track planes with the local SkyAware map flying within ~100-150 miles of the ship, using maybe a PiHat screen, would be interesting.
I hope you’re able to leave your receiver there. More coverage in remote places is always welcome.
@hukl If you are eager to build your own antenna, i can get my python code for the free form (classic, quad, loop, etc.) yagi optimization into shape and release it.
