Hello,
Does anyone have any experience of using a commercial cell tower as a location for piaware? I’d welcome and appreciate any tips/gotchas from the community!
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A cell tower with commercial antennas? Then you might need a very good shielding against neighbor frequencies. Otherwise your receiver would be entirely deaf and blind.
I know from some guys here in germany they have a good connection to church officials and were allowed to place their device on a church tower.
I drive by the big tower down the highway from home or the couple low level boosters in my neighborhood my SiriusXM receiver in my car goes silent. Wouldn’t doubt the signal from them that close doesn’t walk all over an ADS-B signal as well. Not even sure great shielding will work that close to them.
Just dealing with the tower operator(s) would be too much of a headache, let alone mitigating the interference from the site. Even the power supplies for those cell transceiver radios are very noisy. Then hiring an Engineer to OK the installation, hiring a professional rigger to install the equipment, and purchasing the “approved” cabling, wire-ties, antenna clamps, cable clamps, lightning mitigation, etc, etc…It gets VERY complicated and expensive!
If you want to get data from a particular area and/or airport ground traffic, try contacting someone who owns a hanger nearby or at another nearby municipal airport where people are easy to approach and understand what you are looking for. Local flying clubs are very valuable for this type of thing… Good luck!
I have several mountain top sites that are within 100’ of cell towers.
It adds a lot of challenges. Yes, filtering. I’ve used the RTLSDR 1090 filters for sites that were only 1090, and more recently I’ve been using a FlightAware UAT/ADSB filter and broadband amp at the antenna, and sometimes a second filter near the splitter for the receivers. Also use quality antennas, and typically I’m using 1/4” or 1/2” andrew hardline (100% shielding) to keep the cell signals out of the receiver. Gain is significantly reduced on the receivers to avoid overload, given the external signal amplification. That’s just the requirements to deal with the RF issues, for an adjacent building/tower.
Very few cell towers are owned by the cell companies. Usually they are owned by the tower management companies, and they don’t give space away for free.
Hope that helps.
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