Hi there. This is a follow-up to a previous post by me. In that post I described a strange issue where my own plane does’t show on my own receivers. Now it been a while and I have changed a lot, but the problem persist.
My own receiver has been completely reinstalled with dump1090-fa as decoder and feeding FA with piaware (and to that also other services). My plane has got new ground plane for the transponder antenna, new GPS-source dedicated to the transponder.
Today I tried this out and the problem remains. As can be seen here my plane shows up on other receivers but not my own. Not even as MLAT. I am out of solutions to try, and any input from the community, both tracking enthusiasts and pilots, is most welcome. Maybe I don’t have to mention that the plane doesn’t show up on any other services either (RB, FR24 etc). Thanks in advance!
You are running four receivers at four different locations (?)
Do none of your receivers see your own plane or is the problem only with one/some of your sites?
That’s correct. The issue is the same on all of them. They are not identical in setup though, some have older Buster OS, decoder etc.
As comparison here is the track log by another plane with similar transponder/setup as mine, from approximately the same time as I flew today. The KID/ESMK receivers are mine most of them.
I’d go with too high gain as your receivers are closest? (maybe not but that’s really the only thing that comes to mind)
Very weird that that would result in the symptoms you described but it’s not impossible.
To be honest to further look into this we would need a message logs of the received messages.
You have a receiver you are happy to experiment with?
view1090-fa --show-only 4AD978 > 4AD978.log
You probably want to run it inside screen as the ssh might disconnect while you go flying.
And you’d want to test if it works correctly with another hex.
After your flight you’d upload the file here and we could take a look.
sudo apt update
sudo apt install -y screen
to get screen
screen
to get into a screen instance
then test with some hex that you are currently receiving
view1090-fa --show-only 4AD978 > 4AD978.log
Open another ssh into the pi, then have a look if the messages are getting logged, post a sample of a couple messages here:
tail -f 4AD978.log
Thanks wiedehopf for this helpful reply. I have indeed receivers that I can experiment with, actually I have spare parts to set up one more that I could flash from an FA-image instead of my normal headless RBpi-setup. Just to make sure that there are no errors on the receiver. I will solve this in some way and get back when I have a log.
Just a quick question, I did a test with your commands but can’t get viewdump1090-fa to work, is the syntax correct?
What is the error?
Oh it’s view1090-fa maybe?
I’m used to using my decoder readsb with the viewer viewadsb (fork of dump1090-fa).
I don’t suppose you have graphs1090 installed? (GitHub - wiedehopf/graphs1090: Graphs for readsb / dump1090-fa / dump1090 (based on dump1090-tools by mutability))
If you have what does the signal level graph look like?
Might as well adjust gain before you go flying!
Aha, I see, no I didn´t know of view1090-fa but I´ll have a look. Thanks for clarifying.
graphs1090 for the one reciever I will be using for this is here. I´ve set it to manual gain for now and it might not be optimal but it pics up the small traffic as it should. I´m quite close to the local airfield. It´s easy to access tar1090 from the link above. This receiver uses dump1090-fa as decoder.