I agree to that. Especially (at least for me) the last updates. The sliders are really great
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Worked a treat thanks 
Jetvision have their own propitiatory version of a dump1090 display equivalent; it’s not just a dumb box that feeds data, you can also get range plots etc…
I’ll let you know how it goes
I think that is exactly why Jetvision built it. It is ready to run out of the box and can be used in 10 Minutes or less.
It’s more a “fire-and-forget” device where almost zero configuration or tuning is required.
It is also very stable, the device monitors itself. If something is not working, it either restarts the services or the whole device automatically. Their receiver/decoder seem to be very well optimized, as it is using less CPU on that dual-core device compared to dump1090 on a quadcore Raspberry.
For other people like you as a very experienced user with specific interests/expectations there are other solutions/options.
Finally none of the devices is able to create miracles. Many users forget the existing environment, especially obstacles and/or geographical specifications.
If it’s really worth the (now) almost 500/800 Euro is a decision everyone has to do on her/his own. Honestly for this price i would not buy it again.
As said in an earlier thread, some are buying expensive classic cars, stamps…
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That is because the heavy lifting of the decoding is being done in an FPGA. The board running the software just gets a stream of decoded messages, and it doesn’t take much cpu power to handle that.
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Thanks, good to know.
Yesterday i made a quick check regarding the question of the message rate. (as questioned by Caius)
So i placed a raspberry configured with FA5.0 side by side and checked the message rate by swapping the antenna once every few minutes.(waiting long enough to have the FA pages updated properly)
It is clearly not100% accurate, but the message rate of the AirSquitter was in average about 15-20% higher than the Raspberry while the visible aircraft were the same.
Also the number of connected MLAT servers was the same (according to the FA stats page)
But as said, for a full review you would need to run both systems side by side
Unfortunately i do not have an Airspy to perform the same check, but would expect similar results based on my location and environment.
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I’ve got a blue FA stick and an RTL-SDR running side by side on the same antenna, and I’ve noticed the RTL has a consistently higher message rate - I’ll see how the Air Squitter compares.
But you’re right… fancier equipment won’t give much better range etc, as it’s so down to line of sight / horizon, so a good antenna mounted as high as possible will have the greatest effect by far.
Everything else will just be optimisation.
Last week I was looking at the Airsquitter with a serious consideration of taking down the Pi4 and Airspy from the box up my mast and fitting one as a replacement.
But to be blunt, even if it’s slightly better, I still wouldn’t do it because I don’t want to lose the tweakability. I like my graphs, plots, etc and I don’t believe they’d be possible.
So I’m out.
For this you might need the full license which is another 370 Euro and some programming skills to get this all together. Only with the license you will get access to the networking ports which are then required
So you’re right with thinking about it twice.
The RTL-SDR is know for that. That’s and the price makes it popular.
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Hiya,
I can’t get the HeyWhatsThat tar1090 overlay to work - any clues?
I’ve got the URL from HWT and replaced the XXXXX with it, as per your instructions, but do I need to create a file or install something else or just copy and paste the edited URL into the RPi? 
Thanks
I linked the instructions.
I suppose it needs to say: run this command … though what else would you do with a command?
Cheers!
I’ve sorted it now - finger troubles 
Working great
Regarding the message rate:
Almost 1200 frames/sec with 66 active aircraft only i’ve never seen with a FA stick. With this it was a ratio of 1:10 normally.
The 5 Minute average is around 1000 currently.
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You’d have to check if you’re counting apples and oranges here.
This includes ModeC if i’m not mistaken … but really don’t know.
1200 msgs/s doesn’t seem unreasonable for mode-s only. With a similar number of aircraft I get a range of anywhere between 800-1400 /s with the average being somewhere around 1200.
I normally max out around 600-700, so that’s good going
Although I’m still experimenting with my newly acquired Airspy Mini + Uputronics LNA/Filter, I’m getting 900-1100 messages/sec for ca. 60 aircraft using a sampling rate of 12 and gain of 19.
I cannot say if ModeC is included or not, that’s something Jetvision need to be asked.
The aircraft overview only distinguishes between ADS-B, MLAT and FLARM aircraft:
I am feeding Opensky-Network as well which is counting the messages accordingly. The shown frames (average) are pretty much the same there as “messages” (with a slight delay based on the network and without peaks) . And from what i see, they are counting Mode-S only.
That’s my profile
https://opensky-network.org/receiver-profile?s=64865021
I am waiting for more traffic to see how the rate is scaling with higher traffic. I still have the numbers from my previous raspberry available for comparison with a similar number of aircraft.
What i can say that i never got these message rates on my Raspberry with this number of aircraft.
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Mode C has to be activated in settings, on default (and recommended) is set to OFF.