Hi,
New to ADS-B kits. Does either of the kits in the store do both 1090 and 978, or would one need to buy one of each kit to track both? 1090 seems to be the most common.
You would need to buy one of each kit. However, if you want to run a dual 1090/978 mhz feeder, you would be better off sourcing a Pi 3b, 3b+, or 4 and the individual dongles and antennas and going from there. The flightaware kits use a Pi Zero W, but the Zero doesn’t have quite the power required to run a dual dongle setup.
Do you have any prior experience with Raspberry Pi’s, or ADS-B feeders?
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It is also depending on your location. In the US 978 MHz is common, in Europe it is hardly used. So that might be deciding factor as well.
I have two other Pi’s (One for Homeassistant, other PiHole) but by no means am I good with unix short of following instructions. Pi’s are hard to come by and was surprised these kits show in stock.
Hi, I am in the US on the edge of Class D airspace if that means anything. I learned this when I thought about buying a drone and the app said I couldn’t fly here. 
Yep, that rings a bell, I’m an aviator 
in GA aircraft in my country in Europe.
You would benefit from 978 MHz then since you are in the US.
Except, from what I have seen, 978 MHz traffic is typically only about 5% of the 1090 MHz traffic. And that’s on a clear sky day when there’s lots of GA aircraft.
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Yep you are correct, the amount of traffic on that frequency band is much lower then 1090 Mhz
Hi @sdsvtdriver , could we ask what is your starting interest in aircraft tracking?
Did you just come across this site or similar, think ‘that looks cool, I want in’? or perhaps you have a particular interest in one segment of the industry?
Perhaps you want to be the highest performing site in your area.
All good reasons for setting up a receiver, but it makes a difference where you focus your energy (and money!).
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Can confirm. 5% would probably be only during the summer; a lot less in the winter. Here’s my % of UAT traffic since 2020-01-01. Definitely weather dependent. And range is limited as well compared to 1090 mHz; location matters, need to be close to an airfield or 2. I added it just to see the few aircraft that weren’t using 1090 that were flying nearby. If i had to use two (2) kits, I’d wait until Spring to add the 2nd since there isn’t as much 978 traffic this time of year.
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Thanks everyone. I’ll grab the 1090Mhz kit and go from there. I’m near a military base which has some helicopter and osprey traffic daily and occasionally some other neat visitors. I am also near a track for int’l flights into LAX as I will see contrails if the weather is right.
These flights already show up on Flightaware and the military ones are on adsbexchange, but I figured getting one these kits would be neat to play with and contribute data to the platform. Do these kits do the latter?
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Yes. Absolutely.
20chr
markrichardson,
How do you output that data graph?
I copy the data from the Feeder Statistics Page into an Excel spreadsheet and create the graphs. A little time consuming but for my data ocd it works!
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