I recently upgraded my set up. I have a blue FA dongle, PiZero2w and I was using an internal stick aerial outside but was getting some great range. The only problem was that my roof was blocking planes to the north.
I decided to purchase a FA aerial and have mounted it high on the chimney of my house. There is a mobile phone mast nearby so I had to add a filter (Navy blue FA). The stick aerial wasn’t in sight of the mast so it didn’t seem to be affected by the mast.
With the aerial up higher and with it being an external aerial I would expect to get better range but I am down in range and picking up a little more aircraft than before.
The only thing I can think of is the gain, both setups used 49.6 gain but unsure what to play around with.
Here are my stats below. I don’t have the before aerial change stats as my card failed. Any tips would be greatly appreciated.
Are you using the PiAware image or a package/script install onto Raspbian? What version of PiAware do you have? How long is your coax and what kind is it?
Then I think you would edit /etc/dump1090-fa.conf to change your gain, if memory serves (I’m using readsb instead.) 49dB is probably way too high and you’re getting garbling or clipping. Remember that the dongle contains an LNA. I would start with a gain of 29.7 then watch your graphs1090 and your feeder’s map and adjust the gain from there as necessary after monitoring for a day each time. Or you could enable the autorange feature in the same file and let gain adjust itself automagically. I think that’s disabled by default. sudo nano /etc/dump1090-fa in an SSH session.
