After many hours troubleshooting lockups on my PiAware setup, writing new images, changing antenna, swapping out the Raspberry Pi I have figured my AirSpy Mini has gone bad.
The big clue is how hot it gets and how quickly, everything is running OK now on my old RTL-SDR for the time being.
Anyone else had issues with an AirSpy going bad?
What were the symptoms of the lockups that you had? Was the Raspberry Pi still responding, and if so, did the airspy_adsb log give any hints as to the issue?
I did have an issue some time ago where the airspy_adsb process would freeze but not “fail”. I tracked that down to momentary physical disconnection of the Mini’s USB cable. I needed to reboot/power cycle the Pi to get it running again.
My Mini has been running almost continuously for 900 plus days at 20 Msps so far. How long had yours been running?
I would be interested to hear from others how long they have had Airspy Minis in operation as adsb receivers. That would give a very crude indication of minimum expected lifetime for the device when used like this.
The Pi was becoming completely unresponsive, wouldn’t even respond to a ping and drops off the wireless network. Hadn’t got as far as hooking up a monitor to have a closer look.
I am suspicious that it damage may have occurred in the last couple of week. We moved house and it has been set up temporarily (hence the wireless) to keep my numbers up. It has had the power knocked out a couple of times.
Also it was hooked up to a smaller secondary antenna for a bit by accident. The primary I use has a Uptronics amp on the mast so uses bias-t to power (external not the AirSpy), so there was power on the line with no amp for a few days, I am wondering if that might have cooked it?
It was originally installed back in November 2019 so has been running a few months shy of three years.
I had one fail shortly after it arrived. It just stopped receiving suddenly, and that was it.
I think there is a little switch to put in a different mode, and it was still visible when it was plugged in a computer.
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