I thought already about the gain optimization, but unsure if this makes differencies.
The setting in piaware-config.txt says “rtlsdr-gain max” on the receiver configration. Is this the setting to be changed?
For the antenna i am mid-term planning to get an outdoor version, maybe DIY.
But we are close to a location move, depending on the new home i can mount it somewhere.
The antenna i am using is this one, mounted on a metal cake box:
@SweetPea11
I saw this already. I’ve set up my environment on Thursday evening with lots of experiments running through the house with the device and the antenna.
My wife already asked me if i took any kind of drugs
Maybe the next project will be a DIY antenna, but this might take a while
I’ve had that exact antenna and built a whip of the proper length.
It’s not optimized for 1090 MHz, it seems everyone does this false advertising for the whip antennas.
You can either cut the whip or unscrew it and replace it with a piece of wire of the correct length.
Not significantly. Most of the mag base antennas are dubious at best. While they are quick to setup, they will be outperformed by just about anything.
In terms of height, higher is almost always better.
I’ve just left Frankfurt and writing from the ICE591!
You should be able to do a lot better than that. Have a look at the stats of your nearest
Thanks, never thought about that. I will check it, but before damaging it, i would rather try a DIY cantenna or something like that.
As i am close to EDDF (west of it) maybe that’s the reason why i am currently satisfied. Peak times show 100 aircrafts. What i do not get are aircrafts coming from east approaching, they are too low (or my antenna )
If you look on the polar distribution where i got the most signal and the highest range is the opposite direction of the window where the antenna is located.
I would have expected that the view out of the window would be better than the opposite.
The antenna is “looking” towards EDDF and not westwards as the polar view looks like
Sure, but i got up at 4am local time (due to our noisy neighbours) and not much traffic. Neither in the air, nor in the Forum.
Thanks for your suggestion. I’ve seen this antenna on eBay as well and i did not expect such a gain.
Will try it DIY first and then move to this one probably.
Yes, that’s what i thought about already
Maybe a project for a rainy day.
I just went up and move the antenna a bit. Even this gives a gain in signal and as a indirect effect longer range.
Looking forward for this DIY thing…
I was just running the small one liner from your wiki entry “optimizing gain” and it gives me this value: “Percentage of strong messages: 7.804”
What do i do with this information now? any good or bad? What should i change from software perspective beside the antenna thing?
Or shall i start with the antenna first?
Advise on that is in the same post as the command.
If you have close by traffic that vanishes near you, reducing gain can help.
Right above the command is the link on how to change gain, does that link not work?
Changing the antenna you’ll have to have a look at gain again.
Impressive… I should check in the toolbox where to find a tong…
Meanwhile I changed the position slightly of the antenna without any additional stuff.
The range has been increased and also the number of flights and positions have been increased significantly. (from 1245/62430 to 1747/115288 in a few hours)
Now i will check cutting the antenna. I hope the lower part is long enough.
I just found in my garage a piece of copper wire which is normally used for inhouse cabling (the fixed one), cut it in the appropriate length and wrapped it around the socket screw as mentioned above. This is just quick and dirty for testing:
The resuts are better than stock antenna:
aircrafts the same time: +10%-+30% (depending on the time of the day)
range: +20%
signal: +10%
message rate: +100%
So for me as beginner this is already an improvement, will test other antennas as well.
The antenna is currently placed on a kidney bean can, wondering if a cucumber can is getting better results.
I made the changes yesterday late afternoon, so i can give an update after full 24 hours compared to the previous day.
So far it looks better. Yesterday morning at this time the # of aircrafts was 15, now it’s already 30 displayed in live view. You can see the antenna change in the graph at around 5pm
)
