On this page: flightaware.com/adsb/prostick/setup/ for the PaAware 3, the instructions state to use the rtlsdr-gain command to change the gain setting. That seems to work fine. However, the next instruction says to restart PiAware with the new gain using the command sudo systemctl restart piaware.
That does not seem to work. Nor does selecting restart piaware from the web interface. What does work is selecting the reboot option.
Is there some configuration I need to do to allow this restart of piaware to work without a reboot?
So if you have the website up showing your local data, what happens when you enter the command? Can you notice anything on the screen? I notice nothing at all. Of course, I wouldn’t expect to see anything unless the change were relevant. So, for example, when I change the gain from the default -10 to 10, for example, I would EXPECT some of the planes to disappear and for the message count to go down. That doesn’t happen. When I reboot, though, I lose my connection to the RPi, of course. And I have to reconnect to the website served by it. When I reconnect, the map displays with a dearth of planes, and slowly, over a period of maybe 10-20 seconds or so, the message count reaches an asymptote. After having changed the gain from -10 to 10, said asymptote, as expected, is significantly lower than at -10, which seems to confirm that the command did not take without a reboot.
My install was from an SD card image. I’ve made edits, but only to display range rings, plane colors, and so forth, which shouldn’t tough piaware.
But it’s piaware, the service, that uses the gain setting that is being adjusted, right? dump1090-fa is just a consumer of the data generated with that service, right? Does dump1090-fa use the gain setting somehow?
Edit: If it’s restarting dump1090 that needs to be done, why do the instructions say to restart piaware? And more to the point, why doesn’t it say to restart dump1090?
The piaware-config stores the value set by the user, but does NOT adjust the gain of the RTL chip of the dongle. It is dump1090-fa which reads this gain value from piaware-config whenever it STARTs, and sets the gain of RTL chip. It is therefore necessary to restart dump1090-fa.
OK. I’ve confirmed that that works, but my main point remains, that the instructions on flightaware.com/adsb/prostick/setup/ seem to suggest that the thing to do is to adjust the gain and then restart piaware for PiAware 3. For PiAware 2, the instructions state to restart dump1090.
No, you have that exactly backwards. dump1090-fa generates the data and uses the gain setting, piaware is the consumer of the data.
Edit: If it’s restarting dump1090 that needs to be done, why do the instructions say to restart piaware? And more to the point, why doesn’t it say to restart dump1090?
