Well, this morning I received the USB-hub (this one).
As expected; this doesn’t work without external power. I connected it to the Raspberry Pi and put the dongle on the end.
The dongle’s blue LED does light up, but when I log in the webpage of the Pi it doesn’t load.
I can log in using Putty and when using the command “sudo piaware-status” it says that 'dump1090 is not producing data on port 30005".
So I guess the dongle isn’t receiving enough/reliable power.
Now I thought I had the right connector laying around, but it turns out it’s to small (2.5mm instead of the needed 3.5mm).
So I’ll have a look around to see if I have that one; if not; I will have to order it somewhere.
Then I will test if it will work with external 5V power applied.
EDIT: meanwhile I did trim of the top end of the stock antenna and my range improved ever so slightly.
I received the first two. I wonder what that flat RG6 cable will do to the signal; it’s so thin!
Only need some RG6 and F connectors to make the ~10 meter run to the antenna and the antenna itself. But first I need to figure out how I’m going to mount the antenna on the roof. I’m thinking using two hooks like these to mount them without drilling into the roof. I do need to find them and make some way of frame or something to mount the antenna to them.
Meanwhile I ditched the powerline adapter and replaced it with a Wifi-dongle (less cluttered setup) and placed the setup behind another windows facing the same direction.
(Now the Raspberry is directly above the router, one floor up)
I was afraid connecting it through wifi would cause some issues but so far none.
As said; I did cut of the tip of the antenna yesterday I placed the antenna on a can, but no big improvements there.
This new location (even though placed again behind windows, same direction) does create a smaller range though…
This projects has been put on hold for a while since I had better things to do.
But at this point I only need some RG6 (10-15 meters) and the antenna.
I figured out I might be able to run the RG6 underneath the roof tiles instead of over them for better aesthetics.
(The roof is built like this)
The other thing is the antenna. I was settled on this.
But I might as wel go DIY and make something like the Spider design.
It’s much smaller which helps both aesthetics as well as mounting it (the Ebay antenna requires much sturdier mounting).
Here are my specs. I have tracked up to 250nm, & up to 140 simultaneous aircraft.
RPi 3 B
15’ LMR 400
1’ LMR 250 (originally RG58 1’ pigtail; no change in range or message rate after changing to LMR 250)
FA Antenna
FA 1090 Filter
FA Pro Module
Surge arrestor connected directly to antenna & ground.
Installed on roof ~18’ above ground.
I had an issue with an active USB cable to power my Raspberry Pi. It seems there were voltage issues. This was resolved by ordering this power supply, which starts out at a higher voltage, so after the voltage/power reduction caused by the cable length, what’s left at the far end is sufficient.
The active cable will rob some of the power in order to maintain the signal. For our application, we’re not so much interested in USB signal but power. So I’m not sure what benefit there is to using an active cable. It seems better would be for the cable to have as low resistance as possible to keep voltage/power drop to a minimum.
@Iemand91:
The commercial antennas are supposed to give better results, but with some bad commercial antennas give poor results. The Slovakian Antenna on eBay must have been used by many. If anyone who uses it gives his opinion, it will be of great help.
First make a reference antenna.
The Spider is good as reference. It is easy & cheap to make. If you dont have SO239 connector handy, make a Cantenna, which uses a commonly available F-type barrel connector for RG6.
After using Spider or Cantenna for few days or few weeks, you will get a fairly good idea of what you can get with DIY antennas. You can then order a commercial antenna, and compare its results with results of Spider/Cantenna to find out how good your commercial antenna is.
I will just order the SO-239 and adapter.
Will probably take a week or 2/3 but meanwhile I can figure out how exactly I’m going to mount it.
I’m going to use a hook similar to this but I need to figure out how to mount the antenna to it, in the correct angle. (so the antenne is vertical)
(Just bending it with a hammer is probably not going to work)
I just moved my antenna from the side of the house on the roof using a 80 ft cable! Pretty much doubled the reported positions. So having the antenna on the roof makes a whole lot of sense. I used some pretty high quality cable CA240-PE-NMSMAP-080F from air802.com.
Having good cable makes such a difference. I had compared the 80ft with a 6ft earlier and only lost 3db which I compensated in configuration…
Reposrting went from 12k positions to 26k positions per hour Happy…
I have my pi, dongle and filter placed inside under the rooftop in the attic, directly below the outdoor antenna. The Pi is connected via WiFi. The FA antenna is on top of the roof outside, mounted on the chimney. The feed through the roof is done by 3 meters of Aircell 7 coax cable, with an dedicated Aircell 7 N-connector at the antenna side, and an Aircell 7 SMA connector on the other end.
Aircell 7 is an high end coax cable with a matching series of various connector types.
I kept the length of the coax as short as possible to reduce the losses as low as possible.
My advise: stay away from USB extention cables. They can cause power feeding issues to your dongle. I even tried a 5 meters long high-end active USB cable, but the dongle wasn’t working.
Still waiting for one part to arrive from China to build the spider…
Meanwhile I have bigger problems. My setup stops working every day; visible here.
The same setup worked fine until a week or 2 ago.
piaware.out.txt says the following:
08/08/2016 14:38:02 37906 msgs recv'd from dump1090 (193 in last 5m); 37904 msgs sent to FlightAware
08/08/2016 14:43:02 38074 msgs recv'd from dump1090 (168 in last 5m); 38072 msgs sent to FlightAware
08/08/2016 14:48:02 38312 msgs recv'd from dump1090 (238 in last 5m); 38310 msgs sent to FlightAware
08/08/2016 14:48:20 mlat(950): Receiver status: connected
08/08/2016 14:48:20 mlat(950): Server status: synchronized with 47 nearby receivers
08/08/2016 14:48:21 mlat(950): Receiver: 57.8 msg/s received 1.1kB/s from receiver
08/08/2016 14:48:21 mlat(950): Server: 0.1 kB/s from server 0.0kB/s TCP to server 0.1kB/s UDP to server
08/08/2016 14:48:21 mlat(950): Results: 42.0 positions/minute
08/08/2016 14:48:21 mlat(950): Aircraft: 5 of 12 Mode S, 12 of 15 ADS-B used
08/08/2016 14:53:02 38619 msgs recv'd from dump1090 (307 in last 5m); 38617 msgs sent to FlightAware
08/08/2016 14:57:54 mlat(950): Lost connection to localhost:30005
08/08/2016 14:57:54 mlat(950): Reconnecting in 30.0 seconds
08/08/2016 14:57:54 mlat(950): Beast-format results connection with localhost:30104: connection lost
08/08/2016 14:57:54 lost connection to dump1090 via faup1090
08/08/2016 14:57:54 reconnecting to dump1090
08/08/2016 14:57:54 no ADS-B data program seen listening on port 30005 for 0 seconds, next check in 60s
08/08/2016 14:58:02 38899 msgs recv'd from dump1090 (280 in last 5m); 38897 msgs sent to FlightAware
08/08/2016 14:58:24 mlat(950): Connection to localhost:30005 lost: [Errno 111] Connection refused
08/08/2016 14:58:24 mlat(950): Reconnecting in 30.0 seconds
08/08/2016 14:58:24 mlat(950): Beast-format results connection with localhost:30104: [Errno 111] Connection refused
08/08/2016 14:58:54 no ADS-B data program seen listening on port 30005 for 60 seconds, next check in 60s
08/08/2016 14:58:54 mlat(950): Connection to localhost:30005 lost: [Errno 111] Connection refused
08/08/2016 14:58:54 mlat(950): Reconnecting in 30.0 seconds
08/08/2016 14:58:54 mlat(950): Beast-format results connection with localhost:30104: [Errno 111] Connection refused
08/08/2016 14:59:24 mlat(950): Connection to localhost:30005 lost: [Errno 111] Connection refused
08/08/2016 14:59:24 mlat(950): Reconnecting in 30.0 seconds
So my understanding is that Dump1090 is the culprit? Does anyone know what to do?
Setup is connected to wifi via EDIMAX EW-7811UN wifi-adapter.
If you are forwarding port 8080 to the internet, don’t do that as dump1090 tends to crash if you do. (or upgrade to the piaware 3.0.3 sdcard image, which uses a proper webserver to serve the map)
I was indeed forwarding port 8080 to the internet. I did that after I forwarded some ports of my IP camera and thought it would be fun to watch the ADS-B data outside of my local network. But honestly; I never used it.
I deleted the forwarding. I’ll probably know in less then 24 hours if it helped…
I will look into PiAware 3; it looks very promising.
stanislavpalo130 sells good products, I purchased a small antenna from him last year, and worked as should out of the box.
I have however been using an antenna I made from RG213 as an collinear 1090mhz antenna and works so much better.
I know he has made the one I used obsolete and has redesigned some better ones, but going by the one I purchased I see no problems.
His 60CM Antenna ads-b collinear great gain for usb dongle flightbox looks good for the cost.
Best thing is though, get it up high, mines is still only 10 feet above ground on the back of my house, but the signal bounces off the house behind us.
Note: antenna is inside, behind a window. It’s now almost directly above my router so the Wifi connection is better then on my first location; behind another window.
Behind that window the reception was somewhat better.
So I’m probably going to set the antenna up behind that first antenna too, to see results from that location.
And just for fun; mount it outside/high up for a day.
Unfortunately my poor old Raspberry Pi (first generation B) barely holds up. FlightAware says CPU load is 95% or more. With the stock antenna this was only happening when the Pi was booting up.
I don’t know if this is because it’s receiving more positions or something else; but it’s not nice.
The spider is now up for almost 24 hours and August 16 isn’t over yet (almost 16:00 here) but total reports is up, total aircraft not so much.
If you want more details; watch this: nl.flightaware.com/adsb/stats/user/Iemand91
Note: on August 11 I disabled port forwarding; since then my setup doesn’t go down anymore.
I installed the spider antenna yesterday afternoon.
Just ordered the Raspberry Pi 3. Should come in tomorrow.
The soldering job was indeed very bad. The entire ring of solder (with the 8 pieces of copper) came of entirely; it just doesn’t stick/melt to the connector.
Now I’m using the stock DVB-T antenna again.
For outdoor use, apply hot melt glue or some other glue such as two part epoxy glue (araldite, locktite etc) at the point where radials are inserted into the coax jacket. Take care NOT to apply too much glue, as it can enter the coax and break the connection between radial and coax shield. After the glue dries, check connection from tip of each radials to braid (F connector body) of feed coax by a multi-meter/multi-tester/continuity-tester.
Based on my above design, the antenna in the photo below was recently built (in June 2016) by FR24 forum member FR24-BB8.
Happy…
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