Hi folks, I want to run 3 PiAwares. Can I do this on one account, or do I need to have multiple accounts on FlightAware?
Yes, no problem. Each Pi has a unique ID, but all on the one account.
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All on one account,mate.
You can have as many as you want. 
Thanks rosen, I was about to post an update. The claim page shows the additional sites ID and UI.
PiAware - Claim and Link a Brand New PiAware Ground Station - FlightAware. And after a little while I noticed the arrow on My ADB-S.
This is because I need to turn off the MLAT. This device is going to be portable, and I don’t want it to start generating junk data. All I need to do now is figure out the bandwidth, so I know what sim tariff to get. There is another discussion Dump1090-fa while driving and I will ask if he knows how much he is using.
Thanks again for the response.
Rick
You can get a close idea of how much data you are using by looking at the amount of data passed through the interface.
The easy way is to do an “sudo ifconfig” and look at the eth0 or wlan0 interface information.
You can also install something like vnstat. “sudo apt-get install vnstat” for something a little bit more user friendly.
You are looking at around 10-40MB/day without MLAT. I would say 1-2 MB/hour or a kB/sec or less if you aren’t planning to run it all day. This really depends on your local traffic, detection range, and time of day.
Thanks Dave. I am looking to do some work with the Skywatch - Civil Patrol volunteers, and it’s to give us an option to identify when the aircraft is approaching. So it will only be running for about 4 hours.
Cheers
Rick
I should mention that the amount of data I quoted was the connection from PiAware to the FlightAware servers. PiAware doesn’t forward messages to FlightAware based on certain conditions like has the plane change direction or altitude. Has it been x number of seconds between messages. This effectively throws away about 90% of all the ADSB messages before sending them to us.
If you are using the Skyview interface then you are looking at 10x the data rates. This is because skyview and the data link on the ports include all the messages detected. So you are looking more like 10-20MB/hour/connection to sky view or similar map system.
Here is a screenshot of my piaware’s data use to flightaware. Keep in mind this is 5 days of usage shown.
Column headers are: destination, protocol, port, percentage, usage total, upload, download, flows, active time.
Keep in mind that while I am testing this I have MLAT enabled so there is some of the data that is being sent and received that has to do with that.
MLAT increases the data usage to FlightAware. Instead of filter out 90%+ of the messages the server will ask to have all the messages sent to flightaware for planes that aren’t ADSB equipped. If you are living in an area with a lot of the older transponders your data usage can easily double or triple compared to ADSB only (including the MLAT returned results).
Overall, 50MB- 100MB/day for an MLAT site is still very little data on a modern broadband connection. It can add up on cell phone and mobile connection.
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I’ll turn off MLAT on my testing platform and see where the data usage is at in 24 hours.
Ok so the 1st picture is the two hours before I turned off MLAT.
The 2nd picture is the last two hours (roughly 2.5 hours since I turned off MLAT).
No this is not a real fair comparison because it does not span the same amount of time over the same day but the chances of me remembering to catch from 1700-1900 Eastern next week are astronomically unlikely so this will have to do.
Thanks guys for all this info. I installed vnstat as suggested by david.baker on my Pi3 and I have just pull a .png off it. This is running MLAT, and includes the VNC traffic to connect and get the .png
So this is about 12 hours over night so messages fall to next to nothing over night.
I will pull another off on Thursday.
Rick
I am a Luddite. Closed the terminal, therefore closed the session, and terminate Vnstat. Start again.
