An Introductory Note About DIY Antennas

Yes, as stated it’s currently hosted by a kidney bean can i’ve stolen from the kitchen. My wife will hate me for this.

What i also have is a cookie box, will try it later
Does the diameter matter?

.
Not much beyond 70mm dia. Please see this:

Trial Run Results for Four Sizes of [u]Ground Planes[/u]

Similar to your result in Test Run 2 it doesn’t matter which diameter.

The bean can had approx 70mm, now the cookie box is more than 200mm… But the message rate is the same.

To me it looks like that the good indoor location matters more.
Tried to move the antenna a bit on the board and put a box under the can that it comes higher also had a (positive) impact to the results.

I will leave it in this position until the evening and compare it to the day before.

Just checking my page again. Now it shows 2056 flights with 153.000 positions

Congratulations!!

Much better but as my teachers used to say “still room for improvement” :grinning:

S.

LOL

similar to what my wife always say to me “very good, but…”

I learned a lot the last two days.
Another improvement this morning was the connect of the stick using an USB extension.
That brings the temperature on the Raspi down and increase the length of the antenna cable for positioning :slight_smile:

And here’s the difference compared to yesterday from the total amount of recognized aircrafts.

At 18:00 yesterday the day before i changed the antenna. The max. range is now stable at 150-160 NM

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After testing the antenna, i also checked on heywhatsthat my maximum range i can get.

So this is the result from the map:

And this is my current range based on what my device captured.

Doesn’t look too bad for an indoor antenna.
Do i really see a large improvement on changing the antenna from indoor to outdoor (without changing the positioning height)?

thanks

Looks like you are getting pretty close to your terrain limit, but there is still a lot of improvement in terms of aircraft numbers and position count you could achiever (if you care!).

Correct, there is not much to be improved from terrain area. I’m living close to FRA and the planes approaching are the challenge.

It’s funny to see that i have a good view in all directions, independent of the building :slight_smile:

Next plans are an outdoor DIY antenna, but i do not expect lots of improvement. Maybe the aircrafts on low altitude, these are missing but it’s natural so close to one of the busiest airports in Europe

Could well be their signal is too strong.
If these posts here Thoughts on optimizing gain don’t make sense to you, there is an automatic adjustment i’ve written:
Automatic gain optimization for dump1090 fa · wiedehopf/adsb-wiki Wiki · GitHub

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I am using the Flightradar pro plus stick and in the config the gain is set to “max”.
Does it make sense to get this done on this stick as well?

It has the filter and amplifier built in.

This is my signal level the last six hours:

Amplifier pretty much says it. Signals might get too strong.

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Also if the coverage at “heywhatsthere” says that the area of the low flying aircrafts can’t be covered?

Just asking… I killed already my system once due to playing around with it :slight_smile:

If they are below the horizon then the signal is obviously not “too strong”.

My scripts normally don’t kill systems.
Also the thread on optimizing gain really explains the better metric, percentage of messages >-3dB.
It’s also printed in the first graph.
If that’s greater than 5 percent you should consider reducing gain.

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Yes, that’s my concern also. I can “see” the aircrafts on the radar until they reach approx 1000 meter altitude, then they disappear.

The area on the map where they disappear 0fits to the max. possible coverage shown on heywhatsthere if i am entering this altitude there as reference.

I will give it a try anyhow. As long as it is not getting more worse, i am fine with it.

Just checked your location.

The planes it might help with are small planes flying low and less than 10 km from your position.

Frankfurt approach is probably too far away for the signals being too strong.
Still it’ll likely lead to more fluid position updating on aircraft on approach to Frankfurt.
(Messages from the same aircraft can have different signal strength due to 2 antennas being used)

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Correct.

aircrafts approaching Frankfurt from west (my direction) i can see until that level. If the operational direction is the opposite with aircrafts from east, there’s no chance to get them.

I will give it a try.

Have it installed

Waiting until 02:45 in the morning now :slight_smile:

If you don’t want to wait, just run:

sudo dump1090-fa-autogain

Don’t run it more than once an our though :slight_smile:
If it doesn’t find the command, log out and back in to the pi.

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