I have been wanting to get one of these devices but have also thought it is over my head to buy and make one work. So, my question is…can a non techie buy all of these parts and make it work without shooting one self in the food and wasting $100-$150 bucks? Thanks in advance.
Absolutely! While it does help to have some experience with networking, radio and Linux, it’s not really required in many cases. The instructions are pretty clear and the support on these forums is pretty good. Depending on where you are, there is likely someone in your area that might be able to help out.
hi ron,
i didn’t shoot myself in the food too hard when starting about 14 days ago.
here’s in short what you need:
what hardware you need (total costs below 90$):
- raspberry pi 2
- raspberry pi 2 housing
- raspberry pi 2 micro usb power supply 2A
- usb dvb-t dongle with antenna
- 8-32 gb micro sd-card class 10
- ethernet-cable (raspberry to your network)
what software/setup to use (all freeware):
- piaware disk image (ready to run incl. raspbian os)
http://flightaware.com/adsb/piaware/build
what improvements can be done (free of costs):
- shorten your antenna to 67mm length along abcd’s howto (10-20% better performance)
http://discussions.flightaware.com/ads-b-flight-tracking-f21/how-to-improve-performance-of-whip-antenna-of-dvb-t-t36000.html
what improvements can be done (costs about 60$):
- usb wifi dongle
- flightaware 1090mhz ads-b antenna - 66cm/26in
regards
tom
I find 8 GB perfectly adequate and faster to backup/restore/re-flash in case of bad crash or sd-card corruption.
me too 
but for standard use the bigger ones mostly last longer since there are more cells that share to be written. any way - i’ll set it to 8-32gb