There is no need, the current product is wide open at 978, almost no difference at all compared to 1090.
What we need is instead a tighter filter that fiters out everything below 1GHz, for all of us in the world that has NO UAT, but plenty of GSM900.
And, the blue PsP will never do UAT, since it has a 1090 SAW filter…!
/M
sorry meant orange ProStick {will edit prev post}
European availability has been restored via our new partner ModMyPi.com. Please see this thread for more: post203673.html#p203673
Or visit them directly here: modmypi.com/raspberry-pi/br … lightaware
Good news, but what a price hike, eg from 16.95 Euro to 24.79 Euro for the ProStick, the difference increasing further when you consider p&p, which is 4.15 to Germany,
For the ProStick Plus for 30.99 Euro, p&p increases to 8.67 because it is tracked, so the total adds up 39.66 Euro, about the same it costs to buy it on ebay via the US.
Geez, I wish you lot would stop complaining… try getting anything sent to Australia !!! with the way the exchange rate is (not in our favour 99.9% of the time) you lot get things cheap !!!
(BTW - I’m typing this with a big grin on my face)
I agree with biekerc, it is too expensive. Will it be available at Amazon Europe again?
Twice as expensive as I bought it in December 2016 at Amazon Germany with Prime (free shipping).
I live in the southwest of Germany and started tracking in 2/2015 with a “normal” DVB-T (RTL2832U + R820T) stick and the stock antenna. In summer 2015 I switched to a DIY 8 element CoCo antenna which increased the number of positions and flights - up to 120 planes in dump1090. Costs: ~ 14 Euro for the stick, ~ 6 Euro for the antenna (coax-cable, plastic tube, connectors) - which is a total of ~ 20 Euro. In December 2016 I switched to the Pro Stick Plus (paid 19.90 Euro) and now I have up to 150 planes in dump1090.
My conclusion: If someone is interested what’s going on around 150-200 km a good antenna and a cheaper stick is enough. If you want more range and a higher position in the FA statistiscs then think about a Pro Stick or Pro Stick Plus.
I installed mine yesterday and it has helped a bunch. Well worth the 20 bucks! My other unit (R820T2) had started to crash almost daily about a month ago. So far so good!
Just want to share also my experience with the new stick.Get one of the last sticks on Amazon in Europe, and before i have increased my receiving step by step.
but the boost are the Pro Stick Plus! (+100%) with them i double my reception, please see pictures.
I have changed from R820T2 TV & SDR DVB-T USB to Pro Stick Plus!
https://s29.postimg.org/h9v2pq6iv/2101_neuer_sticka.png
https://s27.postimg.org/nvtr885ib/kurzesh1552801.png
Today i shorten my lenght of my H155 cable from 10meter to 1meter that brings me again 20% more reception.
Next step will, to bring my Antenna to the roof(with free view) and bring my raspberry also to the roof within a case.
Also received now planes outside of bounderies:
https://s24.postimg.org/efo2eyr2d/ausserhalb1d2801.png
By the way…
I Get always “You don’t have permission to access /posting.php on this server.” when i will post…
For those wondering if the piaware antenna and pro stick is worth it…
I have had a 600% increase in hourly positions reported and my distance has increased to over 200 miles.
I’m in KLEB territory for awhile (before I go back to KFVE area to retire in six months to four years.)
I was running PiAware here with a standard R820T dongle.
Just switched to a Pro Stick Plus. Also tweaked gain from standard -0dB to +42dB (I assume that’s the unit of measurement here unless manufacturer had chosen something strange.)
I’m seeing a large increase in traffic over what I had before. Probably 100% to 200% more at least.
So, thus far, very much worth the cheap cost.
I guess I’ll be getting the FA antenna in the next month or so - should be an interesting further upgrade then.
I’m pretty impressed with this radio. After operating with the standard DTV dongle for a week, I upgraded to the Pro Stick Plus. Compared to the daily stats for the same day last week, the number of aircraft detected is up 22% while the number of reports received is up a whopping 70%. I’ve noticed increased range as well as many more detections at lower altitudes at airports 60 miles away or more.
BTW, my antenna is the PY4ZBZ dipole (described elsewhere in this forum) about 12 feet off the ground (I’m going to construct one of the coaxial colinear antennas, next).
Finally I ordered the Pro Stick Plus from modmypi.com, but only because I also wanted the new Pi Zero W, and for both (and some other small stuff) the shipping costs seemed more palpatable.
To be fair, it everything arrived quickly, most things I order from the UK take two to three days longer to arrive.
The Pro Stick Plus is unfortunately out of stock right now…
I’m a bit confused: If the prostick +'s LNA is the first device at the antenna input to the prostick + it will set the “system temperature”;
i.e. the S/N ratio is set by the LNA and is a constant downstream of the LNA.
Only the amplification of both the signal and the noise is degraded equally by subsequent processing.
With that in mind the insertion loss of the SAW filter should have no effect on the performance in a quiet environment as opposed to a noisy one.
…so why does it?
Not so incidentally, what is the noise figure of the LNA at 1090MHz? and at what input level does it go into compression?
Thanks for any insight.
I’m a bit confused: If the prostick +'s LNA is the first device at the antenna input to the prostick + it will set the “system temperature”;
i.e. the S/N ratio is set by the LNA and is a constant downstream of the LNA.
Only the amplification of both the signal and the noise is degraded equally by subsequent processing.
With that in mind the insertion loss of the SAW filter should have no effect on the performance in a quiet environment as opposed to a noisy one.
…so why does it?
Not so incidentally, what is the noise figure of the LNA at 1090MHz? and at what input level does it go into compression?
Thanks for any insight.
I think your terms are slightly off. Hope this answer will helps clearing up what we are talking about.
The “system temperature” noise is part of the noise floor. You can think of the noise floor as all the noise that is picked up by the environment, the circuit, the temperature. There are parts that block environmental noise like the FA filter. There are parts the lower the circuit noise like USB chokes and shielding. And there are ways to lower the temperature like fans and heat sinks. The largest and easiest way to lower the noise is with a filter. You can also reduce the other noise sources but they will not have as large as an effect. In most locations the noise floor has been creeping up from around -100dBm in rural location to -80dBm in cities. This is mostly due to the sources of noise from a lot electronic devices.
The signal is the part we want and you get a signal to noise (S/N ratio) based on how high the signal is above the noise floor. We also want the signal to be in the sweet spot for the receiver. It is actually quite hard to measure this without the correct equipment but in practice the prostick can measure from about -40dBm to -90dBm signals. Signal more than -40dBm will be in compression (overloading the receiver). In practice you can adjust the gain on the receiver so it doesn’t go into compression.
The LNA is a 67150 amplifier (check the data sheet linked below) to see that it boost the signal AND noise by ~20dB but also adds ~0.23dB of noise to the signal (ie. this is on the spec sheets as the noise figure). skyworksinc.com/Product/1729/SKY67150-396LF
With that in mind the insertion loss of the SAW filter should have no effect on the performance in a quiet environment as opposed to a noisy one.
…so why does it?
The main aim of a receiver is to increase the S/N ratio (this is what is called performance) and there are two ways to do this. Raise the Signal level OR lower the noise level. Amplifiers do the first thing and filters do the second thing.
Filters lower the noise by a lot and lower the signal level a little. The FA filter is speced at 2dB insertion loss (the signal is slightly degraded) and ~40dB noise rejection (the noise is greatly reduced).
There are so many complicated environments that have different types of noise sources. Without knowing the specific type of noise it is hard to know exactly what will happens to your system. The FA filtering works on a specific type of noise and can actually drop the noise level by 40dB. In other cases you will see no drop in noise.
Back to answer your question on the prostick plus’s built in filtering. It works by filtering mostly white frequency noise and then a lot of out of band noise due to the Low IF design.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_noise
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_IF_receiver
The two key things are:
Thanks for all the info, I was thinking about putting an “ultra” low noise amp (~0.6db at 1090MHz) in front of the prostick+, but with both the prostick+ and prostick having an about 0.23dB NF LNA at 1090MHz I sure don’t want to do that.
I guess when I think about noise it’s in the pass band of the demodulator, any noise outside the demodulated pass band has no effect on performance (unless it overloads something in front of the demodulator).
And you are of course correct on the term system temperature as being an all inclusive term for system noise, varying with the ambient air and component temperatures.
Since ambient air and component temperatures vary with the weather and component cooling methods I usually consider the 1st amplification stage’s NF as setting the noise floor.
On the filter, I have the understanding that it reduces both the signal and noise ~2db inside it’s pass band but about 40 db outside.
So if there were no LNA in front of the filter, just say a ~2dBi gain antenna, the gain of the antenna would be completely eliminated by the insertion loss of the filter.
OTOH if an LNA with a 0.23 dB NF and ~18dB gain were put between the antenna and filter the antenna gain would only be reduced to ~1.77 dB and the 18 dB of gain would replace the losses due to components temperatures downstream of the LNA, thus the S/N ratio would remain the same downstream of the LNA in the pass band of interest.
Definitely the right way to think about how it works. The beginning parts are much more important than the later stages.
This is also the reason we recommend a good antenna and cabling. The biggest increase in performance are in the beginning because once the signal is messed up it can’t be fixed in the later stages.
Gain numbers don’t quite work like that. dB are relative measurements so you have to know what you are comparing it too. Also dB is logarithmic scale so every 3dB change is about half or twice the power. Something with +3dB higher means it has twice the power. Something -3dB lower means it has half the power. Something with +6dB means it has 4x the power. Something with +9dB means it has 8x the power.
The dBi (it ends with the letter i) is a relative measure compared to a isotropic antenna. A 2dBi antenna means that the antenna has 2dB more gain than an isotropic antenna in the main direction. The other way to think of it is that the antenna instead of antenna receiving energy in all direction it will instead get 2dB more in some directions and a few dB less in other directions.
A dBm (it ends with the letter m) is the power relative to a milliWatt of power. So on an absolute measurement the prostick can measure power levels down to about -90dBm. This is why receivers are usually speced in the lowest power level it can detect in dBm.
You should think of it more like this: A plane has a 200W transmitter which sends the signal through the air and it is picked up by the antenna. The antenna turns the signal into a voltage which is in the microV range. This microV signal then has to be transmitted through the cables , amplified and filtered and you can estimate the final signal based on the gain of each part. So your microV signal has a -3dB loss from the cable, then a 18dB gain from the amp, then a -2dB loss from the filter, and finally a +50dB gain internal to the receiver chip (controlled with the gain setting in piaware). With the right oscilloscope you can measure the voltage at the different stages.
We output the final gain on the local web interface as a dBFS measurement (dB Full Scale). This is a dB measurement based on the receiver scale and it isn’t calibrated so you don’t know the actual dBm measurement without an oscilloscope. You can see this measurement by clicking on a plane on your PiAware map and then going to the section on the right and read off the dBFS measurement.
Also, there are lots of other losses than what we have listed. The main thing is that you get a good signal and then not mess it up in any of the stages.
Any update on when any of the Amazon’s in Europe will have stock again?
See post203742.html#p203742. We’re not restocking Amazon in Europe because of import issues.
Availability on Amazon Europe is provided by ModMyPi going forward (and/or any other future retail partners that choose to sell there). You may prefer to order directly from the MyModPi.com web site. They are temporarily out of stock on the Plus but they have more on the way. Demand has exceeded their expectations (good problem to have!) and they are ramping up inventory.