Was your CPU clipping at 99% on the 3, is that the improvement? Or the base processing power can process more messages?
This, basically 
No one who run it on a NUC? 
Diminishing returns.
Extremely diminishing.
Didn’t know that, Tnx.
It’s the sort of thing I’ve been thinking about but the logistics of powering a little tiny PC up the top of the mast and keeping it cool in the height of summer are things I simply can’t be arsed with!
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No clue
It was just something i noticed without any reason. The CPU on the 3 was not that busy,
OK, yes, the message rate is noticeably higher.
Compare the three graphs below. The first one is from the MTG site and you can see that the message rate today is the highest it’s been over the last seven days. Compare that to the second and third graphs which are from my feeders here and you can see that today isn’t the highest day of the week for either of them.
MTG
My external receiver
My loft receiver
The Maxima graphs show a similar thing - The MTG feeder is higher today than it’s been any other day this week whereas mine has been higher earlier this week.
Note, I’m not saying the MTG receiver is better than mine.
MTG
My external receiver
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The DF17 line and positions per second line are definitely higher. Be interesting to see whether it also translates to more aircraft seen as well.
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It’s gone from 7th/8th on the UK leaderboard to 3rd so I can only conclude that the number of aircraft seen has gone up as well. It was definitely a worthwhile upgrade.
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And it’s time for another update and an upcoming upgrade to the MTG receiver.
Since we put it up, it’s gone through a handful of changes, the major being the swap to an RPi4 last year. Something’s happened with the cooling in the box and although the fanshim is still running, the temperature suddenly jumped up in January from 30° to 60° and with summer on the way, it’s going to get even higher.
I spoke to Tony yesterday and we’ve decided to do a complete rebuild in a new box with significantly increased cooling. We’ll build a new one unit and then swap the SD card over so there should be minimal downtime and no loss of streak.
We’re also going to swap the aerial. Currently we’re using a Vinnant COL1090/5-S and we’re replacing it with a Vinnant COL1090/7.5-P for a little extra gain. It’s also going to be raised up in height by about 15’. We’re not putting the actual feeder at the top of the pole so we’ll be using a short run of Hyperflex 13 between the aerial and the box for minimal loss. Practising what I always say, use the best coax you can afford
Knowing what a difference it made raising my aerial by just 7’, it’ll be interesting to see what happens when we’ve completed this work. It doesn’t have quite such a good coverage up to the north east that my receiver does but it’s already slightly better to the west/north west so I’m looking forward to this.
“Watch this space” 
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Looking forward to seeing the results of this. Be very interesting to see how much more there is to gain from an already pretty nicely performing system.
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Agreed, it’s already pretty good and it won’t be able to conjure signals out of the ether that aren’t there, there are only a finite number of aircraft in the air. The increased height will give a little extra clearance from local obstructions which may give us more reports on the periphery.
One of my main concerns is the cooling and this gives us a chance to completely revamp that whilst also swapping out the aerial.
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Looking forward to that, having 2 Col1090/5-S myself, I’ll be curious to the performance difference of the new antenna compared to that one
15 feet of this coax is also affordable 
HELIAX Andrew Coaxial Cable, corrugated copper
I know your comment is tongue in cheek but actually we use LDF450 on the repeaters and I have a 20m coil of it in my shed that’s been there for years. The trouble is the connectors are ridiculously expensive and so are the tools to fit them properly. Plus the bend radius would make it a little tricky to get it into the box unless we mounted the socket on the top and then that’s just a recipe for water ingestion 
/edit - LDF450 loss works out as just over 0.5dB for the length we’re going to use compared to 0.7dB for Hyperflex 13. That just shows good the modern cables are.
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I fully understand, and fully agree to, what you have said about using LDF450 for your MTG receiver. I just wanted to see your reaction to my post.
It won’t surprise you to know that I did consider it
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I am interested to see if there is a change.
Currently i am running the COL1090/7.5-P which has nominal 2.5 dB more gain than my previous Jetvision A3 antenna
But there is not really a difference in the result over time
I feel that antennas with gain > 5 dBi follow law of diminishing return