ADS-B Signal Meter In Development - Seeking feedback!

FlightAware ADS-B Flight Tracking
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Hello FlightAware Community,

We are excited to announce that we are developing a new web interface designed to streamline the installation process of ADS-B antennas for our hosts.

What is the Feature?

Our new interface will function similarly to internet speed monitoring websites like Internet Speed Test , but instead of testing internet speed, it will measure and display the ADS-B signal strength in real-time. We plan to embed this into future PiAware and FlightFeeder images.

How It Works

  1. Live Signal Monitoring: As you move the antenna, the interface will display real-time signal strength data, helping you find the optimal placement quickly.
  2. User-Friendly Interface: Simple and intuitive, the interface will be accessible via any web browser, ensuring you can use it on a laptop, tablet, or smartphone during the installation process within the same network.
  3. Data Visualization (Later): Clear visual indicators will show the signal strength, making it easy to compare different locations and choose the best one.

We Need Your Feedback: Before we fully commit to developing this feature, we want to hear from you – our power users! Your insights will help us fine-tune the tool to better meet your needs. Here are a few questions to get the conversation started:

  1. Utility: Do you think real-time feedback on signal strength will make the installation process easier for you?
  2. Useful Metrics: What specific signal metrics would you find most useful to see in real-time?
  3. Interface Design: Are there particular design elements (graphs, indicators, etc.) that you think would enhance usability?
  4. Additional Features: Are there any additional features or data points you would like to see included?
  5. Installation Challenges: What common challenges do you face during antenna installation that this tool could help address?

How to Provide Feedback

Please share your thoughts and suggestions by replying to this post with your answers to the questions above. Additionally, you are welcome to tell us more about:

  • Your experiences with antenna placement and the challenges you’ve faced.
  • Any ideas you have for making this tool more effective and user-friendly.
  • Examples of features from other tools that you find particularly useful.

Your input will be crucial in helping us develop a tool that truly meets your needs and enhances the ADS-B antenna installation process. Thank you for your continued support and engagement!

Ziquan Wang

ADS-B Hardware Engineer

FlightAware

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Ok, I’ll go first!

I think it’s a great idea. My only suggestion is that for any value that you display, you provide a clear explanation somewhere of what is being measured and how it (may) affect reception.

Having a graph labeled RSSi is fine as far as it goes, but what does it mean to my receiver? Is more better than less? What about signal strength - why is lower higher than higher? etc, etc.

Just my 2 cents.

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Your real time antenna signal feedback proposal is absolutely a welcome feature. I use tools to measure wifi signal strength very frequently to determine optimum router and end device location and would love to have access to such a feature for ADS-B signal strength. I find signal strength output delivered in numbers to be more useful than graphical displays. Thanks so much for your efforts.

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This would be a welcome feature indeed.

I’d like to see it not only in the Piaware and the Flightfeeder images but it would also be an enhancement for the people that are feeding via package installations.
So please make it a package that can be installed optionally like the Piaware-web package.
This will enable much more feedback then just the image users.

A very usefull tools is grahps1090 ( you are hopefully aware of that) GitHub - wiedehopf/graphs1090: Graphs for readsb / dump1090-fa / dump1090 (based on dump1090-tools by mutability)
This does a lot of analysis already but measuring signal strength in realtime will enable to place the antenna optimally and by doing so enhance the data quality and depending on the location also the volume.

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Agreed that having a real-time signal measurement would truly be optimum for finding that sweet-spot without making calculated adjustments and having to wait on feedback.

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Old ham radio, military satellite, and mixed bag of electronics/computer software development.

Great idea to add this, Volunteering to be a tester as I have a 40" ADSB antenna on a pole in the attic and would love to tune the location.

While a signal strength number / plot will be helpful, especially if on a short time interval, local signals are relatively easy to receive. Perhaps some way to set a range minimum distance threshold interactively thus letting us adjust the antenna location to optimize the more distant reception. The range threshold could be toggled on and off to help with antenna location. For me, LOTS of local traffic, could swamp optimization for distance traffic.

The signal strength is good, but a way to display plane count/second and messages/second might also help us tune the location as those are measurements we deal with more often. Is there a way to show the background noise level as that might help find the best location also.

Thinking about how I would present the data to the user, I envision a plot and numbers combination. Plot on the left side, with the most current values added on the right side so the plotted data shifts to the left. The label/numbers on signal strength, planes/sec, messages/sec, background noise level on the right of the plot, color coded to match the plot colors. (Note, 10% of males are red/green/blue color blind so some testing may be needed. This was a factor in a satellite command and control system I worked on) Graphic characters could also be used like * to run the plots if colors become a problem. https://covisn.com/can-only-men-be-color-blind/

Will this be compatible with Airspy R2 / Mini receivers or only SDR’s like the Flightaware receivers?

I see this topic will be very popular and the start of more improvements. This will put FlightAware several steps ahead of the other tracking sites. Great Idea, count me in. Again Volunteer for testing…
Gene

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There are some difficulties with using live data for performance optimisation, mainly because it involves the reception of many different transmitters all at differing ranges and altitudes. Time of day, location, season etc all have large effects. I have found that it can be quite unreliable to use instantaneous readings outside of large scale changes, eg ruling out positions/settings which are obviously much worse. When it comes to optimising, it’s much clearer to take the data in aggregate over a period of time (though even quite short periods can be long enough).

For me personally no because I’ve had my system up and running for years now and it’s quite well optimised. When I was experimenting a lot more with different antennas and especially indoors it would have been quite useful. At the time I used the live message count available on the planefinder client as a rough indicator.

Live message rate is the obvious one because it’s an immediate measure of what you are getting, but with a caveat - a simple number updated once per second is not great because of the inherent variability in number of messages received. It’s quite hard to get a trend from a number that jumps about a lot.

Short term rolling averages to smooth this out might be quite useful in addition to the raw number - 30s, 1min, 5 min etc. Some way to visualise these numbers would be great - a live updating graph for example.

The actual signal strength might be useful, but because there are so many transmitters this would need to be presented in a way that can somehow capture the distribution of those signals so that it is representative. If the aim is to guide new users, then some indication of when signals are too strong might be good, say if too many are bunched up at the top of the range.

Perhaps something along the lines of the stripplot in seaborn would be good, especially if it was live updating. eg with unrelated data:

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Something like that could even be categorised by aircraft type/class or altitude etc.

I have written quite a few scripts to produce graphs and other visualisations over the years. Here are some examples of ones I’ve found handy:

Plotting number of aircraft against messages received can show up obvious differences in config:

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also this one which is from a script which compares two periods of time:

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Histograms can be quite useful for seeing differences. This is a comparison of an indoor and outdoor antenna:

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Here’s a post with some more plots I made for testing airspy performance: Signal Strength Heatmap - #526 by caius

All my scripts are in this repo, though some might need updating to work as I haven’t really done much with them recently.

The ability to create a snapshot of stats for a specified period would be very useful. Being able to quantify differences is essential to determine if changes are significant or not. Looking at numbers while they are happening is fine to an extent, but it’s not a reliable way to assess performance.

For example, you want to test a new LNA or some other change so you press a button to capture an hours worth of stats. You make the change, and press another button and it presents you with a comparison using your first capture as a baseline. Loads of stats are useful here - message rate, range, signal strength, position rate, messages received per aircraft.

I also wrote scripts to generate heatmaps to show coverage. These show up blind spots from obstructions really well and they were quite useful when I was playing with antenna position, especially indoors. There’s a whole massive thread on those: Signal Strength Heatmap

Those involve collecting 24 hours or so of data and plotting it with gnuplot which has no problem with 500k or so points. I’m sure it could be done far more efficiently if written by someone who has a clue about developing rather than me who does battle with a text editor and documentation.

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Perhaps a plot or criteria of signal strength vs range. Signal strength is nice, but range generally pulls in more planes/messages. Since we are rated by how well our systems work, then a graph of max range vs time might be another line on the plot. All depends on how much data can be collected from every message received. I suspect this new analytical tool will have significant CPU usage. Never enough CPU time to do all a programmer wants to do.

Wish I were younger with more time, this would be a fun task to implement. Signal processing, analysis, math, graphics, and all. Guessing, 40% of the code to get the signals in the form needed and get it displayable, 20% of the code to do the calculations, and 40% to display it in a user understandable form. Sadly, the 20% part is the most interesting and critical.

Whatever you develop, it will be wonderful and a good start. We stand on the shoulders of those before us, adding, tweaking, improving all the time. This tool will evolve and become much more than we can envision today. Glad to see FlightAware has the vision to explore this.

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You asked for ideas…

Gain settings are always a hot topic here. Could you give us an easier way to adjust the gain (drop down list?) on the user page Site Configuration customization page. This would greatly simplify tuning our sites so we can avoid file editing, rebooting and then trying to see if it worked and did it help.

Initially focus on the Flightaware SDR’s, expand as things progress. If you can make it work for those with AirspyADSB code, sweet.

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Gene
Wondering if you are already running the modified version of Skyaware that has the gain adjustment script and pull down menu for gain value set? Trying to remember who turned me on to that. I think it could have been ABCD…from Toronto.

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Wasn’t it abcd567 that wrote the code for that browser based gain adjustment? As I recall, FlightAware people were concerned about the security of such code. There was a long thread on it. So I kind of think they won’t be too keen on providing a similar type capability.

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That’s a custom script on github that has to be implemented on top op piaware and dump1090-fa developed by abcd567 indeed.

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We developed a local web UI to configure and manage our latest FlightFeeder that no longer has an LCD screen. We’re planning to port this over as an add on for PiAware to address the hassle of editing files/using the command line to change settings.

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Thank you for the heads up on your plans to port that feature over to PiAware. It will be a welcome addition for many of us I am sure.

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GREAT, THANK YOU. :+1: :+1: :+1:

Long awaited.
Would it be something like Flightradar24 and Planefinder Web Browser based setting shown below?

 

Flightradar24 Web Browser based configuration

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Planefinder Web Browser based configuration

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Craig,
I live near a US Naval training base, rotary and fixed wing, and close to the flightpath for a local airport. One system uses an Airspy R2, the other is a test system with a blue Flightaware receiver. I have used the gain addon, but since it reverts to a default value, not too helpful. The adaptive gain options do not work well with the close overhead traffic. I have edited the files to fix the gain at a single value. Hope the new envisioned interface allows us to control the adaptive values also. Almost feel like diving into the code and fixing it myself for the site configuration menu, but not enough time to dig that far into the code. Have fun out there, and enjoy.

Now if they would just stop spraying our skies every day, we would be healthier and have our beautiful skies again. Rant over.
Gene

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I have tried the adaptive gain configuration here and it doesn’t work for me either because I live between Orlando and Daytona Beach just north of Sanford airport and there is a lot of small aircraft activity that is associated with Embry-Riddle University flight school and a fly-in community that is located in New Smyrna Beach. Fixed gain is the only thing that works for me also. I just run a single system with a FA blue receiver attached to a RPi-4+. Everything is in the house with only the antenna having to weather the heat of the summer. Always room for a rant! Enjoy.

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Sounds like a great idea, especially useful for those of us who are new to all of this and are trying out various antennae types, locations and connections. Bring it on! (Please!)

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Yes similar. You can see an interface snapshot on the H11 installation page.

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Thank you. I have taken a screenshot and posting it below:

 

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