Accessing Dongle (AirSpy) through TCP/IP

FlightAware ADS-B Flight Tracking
1

I was wondering if anyone had attempted to run dump1090-fa on a virtual machine running on an ESXi server and accessing the Dongle through the USB/IP Project. According to the documentation,

For Linux, the source code of usbip was merged into the staging tree, and finally has been moved to the mainline since Linux-3.17. Development is ongoing in the kernel community, not here. Linux distributions will provide binary packages of usbip.

So my thinking was you could have an AirSpy connected to a RPi and install the dump1090-fa on the VM and access the AirSpy through the Ethernet.

Any thoughts?

2

Why?
You could access the data using beastsplitter, vrs etc or simply have the airspy_adsb app send the data to the virtual machine.
Keep it simple and it will be reliable, generally speaking.

3

My ESXi server has CPU cycles to spare, and one of the things I have read in the various AirSpy posts was the CPU on the RPi was a limiting factor. So this would allow for a small footprint device “hosting” the dongle and the VM would have the horsepower to fully utilize the features of the AirSpy dongle.

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4

The network isn’t fast enough for that.

airspy_adsb at 20 MHz basically uses the full USB2 bandwidth.
It’s quite a lot of data.

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5

Well, I guess it is a good thing I asked rather than spending all the time necessary to do this only to be disappointed.

6

You just want to do ADS-B or other stuff with the Airspy?

Which RPi are you using?

RPi4 can use the Airspy to its full potential without issues in regards to ADS-B decoding.

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7

At the moment, I’m just interested in ADS-B. I was planning on using a RPi 3B+, but I did order a RPi 4 B 4GB just last week. Maybe I’ll use that instead. But if I do, I may require a lot of hand holding as so far I’ve only used the PiAware image and from my understanding the PiAware image does not work on the RPi 4.

8

That is true, but installing the piaware addon version isn’t really difficult.
There is an instruction on the FA website and I am pretty sure @abcd567 has written something useful as well.

9

Installing Raspbian Buster Lite on the Pi4 isn’t an issue, download the image, put it on the sd-card, enable ssh access, and plug it in.
Oh the WiFi setup is a bit different if it’s required, but not a problem either.

Following that you just install the piaware stuff: PiAware - dump1090 ADS-B integration with FlightAware - FlightAware

Then you run airspy-conf and you are done with the setup: GitHub - wiedehopf/airspy-conf: Configure airspy_adsb for use with readsb or piaware.

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10

My AirSpy Mini and Filter Preamp is on order, I’ll give it a go when it arrives.

I may put Raspbian Buster Lite on the Pi 4 this week in preparation of receiving the AirSpy.

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11

Well, my Airspy mini and Uputronics LNA finally arrived. Installed on my RPi 4 as per @wiedehopf instructions above, and other than a labelling error on the LNA, everything worked perfectly. I am currently running the Airspy mini at 20 MHz and don’t see any issues. Thank you wiedehopf for your excellent instructions.

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