Heh, yes, I already had that and this and this and a few others bookmarked, but I have another problem to deal with first: my Raspberry, an original Model B, is already running at its limits as it is. dump1090 uses 65-70% CPU and the average load is never below 1.3, most of the time around 1.6. In other words, a better antenna will kill the pi. The question is, should I spend €60 on a new rpi 4B, or should I get something better than a Raspberry in the first place? I’m trying to understand how much I/O is being done on the SD-card, whether performance and card durability would improve by putting some stuff in a tmpfs in RAM and, if so, which stuff.
Also, I’m pondering whether it makes any sense to save the data in a database. In the past few days I have seen an incredible number of bizjets coming, going or passing, many more than I had expected, some with weird trajectories such as ETAR-LGEL. Many have concealed identity, e.g. a Turkish-registered GLEX taking off from LGAV the other day in the direction of Ankara in the middle of a diplomatic crisis and a war of words between Greece and Turkey. On Saturday we had a bushfire very close to where I live and I could follow five different Erickson S-64 on my own dump making the rounds, but I could also see them with my eyes from my balcony. Those beasts can carry 10.000 litres of water each and can fill up again from the sea in less than a minute, but one was flying around with a 1-ton bucket hanging from a wire, while another was in the air for hours without ever picking up any water. So what exactly were they doing with that fire, apart from burning taxpayers’ money? Could a database in the long run provide any interesting insights on the basis of just my own data? Questions like these could affect the hardware, which is precisely why I haven’t ordered a new rpi 4B yet.