I’m allowed 100g per month on my cell based TMobile “At Home Internet”.
Although I’ve gone over 100g every month so far, they haven’t charged me above the base rate of $50…yet.
When I signed up to share data with Flight Aware, the FAQ stated that I should expect about 300m of data transfer per month.
I do also have a 978 system in place, as well as a Davis Vantage Pro 2 weather station for the airport I live on.
Can anyone help me understand why I’m seeing such outragious data usage?
During the busy times of daylight, I might see 165 aircraft at one time and have a message rate of over 900/sec. Is this what’s doing it?
Thanks!
J
There’s something else on this server. The station’s own traffic is small.
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It’s unlikely to be FA.
Without more description of what is running on the system, impossible to guess.
Consider using this to track bandwidth usage on the pi: https://lindevs.com/install-darkstat-on-raspberry-pi
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Darkstat is very handy. My upload/download rate was quite high, I seemed to have adsbexchange installed, and when I shut it down for a while, the data rate dropped to about 15% of the previous level. I had to search (sudo find / -name adsbexchange) and then delete the files to clean things up. Thanks for the info on Darkstat.
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That doesn’t sound like a big win 
Honestly if you’re not on a metered connection, using a bit of bandwidth continuously is not an issue but it will add up to big numbers.
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I find graphs1090 from @wiedehopf a good high-level resouce to see how my feeder is doing. If one has the need, time, and/or motivation to drill down into details, I found the Netdata app with the eBPF plugin to provide deep insights into what’s going on down to the individual image level. Light on resources, ‘free’ to use (can opt out of statistics), something that is useful to track down perceived issues, in my opinion. And when you are done with it, uninstall is a one-line command
For what it’s worth: I feed FlightAware and ADS-B Exchange, run graphs1090 data collection, am located in the middle of nowehere (relatively speaking). My averages over 30 days: 4GB transmitted data, 104 messages/second, 17 aircraft seen on a Raspberry Pi 3 Model A Plus Rev 1.0 (Raspbian/bullseye) used exclusively for flight feeding. Aside from backing up the graphs1090 rrd files daily, no other applications. As might have been stated in other threads, the amount of outbound traffic for flight feeding will vary by the volume of messages received and processed, and then add to that any other applications.
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They don’t charge overages they just slow you down. That said, it’s not FA using that much, something else is.
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Many thanks to all who chimed in.
Flight Aware just sent me a replacement radio for my failed 978 receiver, and I took this opportunity to shut down only the 1090 receiver and measure the data transfer difference.
I went from 8gigs data sent per day, to less than 15megs, with shutting down the 1090 system being the only difference.
I’ve asked FA tech to review my PiAware configuration, in search of any errors I may have made.
Thanks again!
J
What else are you running on there? As mentioned a few times above, it’s very unlikely to be piaware.
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obj,
I have three devices connected to my home wifi…
- Davis Vantage Pro 2 weather station.
- 978 UAT FA receiver.
- 1090 ES FA receiver.
I’ve confirmed with Davis that my weather station is only transferring a few megs per month.
After isolating the 1090 system from my router, my data transfer is now less than 15megs per day.
J
What is being asked. Is was it setup using a guide. Or Sent to you setup.
Not what else is there. I have 6 things using the dump1090 data. As will many others here. You can have multiple apps using the same data/stick.
If you added other features yourself, along with piaware. It’s entirely possible to open a pinhole to the internet or similar and the web server included be exploited.
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If you’re unsure about what else might be running on your 1090 system, I’d suggest writing a standard piaware sdcard image (PiAware - build your own ADS-B ground station for integration with FlightAware - FlightAware, step 2) to a spare sdcard and trying that for a while.
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I purchased separate 978 and 1090 kits from FA, and set them up according to the included instructions.
978 seems to be operating as designed, but the 1090 is dumping HUGE amounts of data for whatever reason.
J
I checked the server-side data from your 1090 site and the uncompressed uploaded data is around 175 MB/day – quite a busy site. The upload process does compress that down so I’d guess that you’re looking at perhaps 75-80 MB/day = ~2.4GB/month.
mlat peaks at around 2kB/s = 5GB/month (but will actually be less because it’s not always at peak)
So it’s not piaware.
As suggested above, if you’ve exposed your 1090 install to the internet then someone may be pulling data from you and causing the high traffic.
Another possibility is that you’re not actually using 175GB/month and your ISP has a data accounting problem. (piaware’s traffic is not like typical web-browsing traffic, so it may be provoking measurement bugs)
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Thanks obj!
I’m not sure what “exposed to the internet” means, but I have only loaded the PiAware on the RPi and nothing else.
I do not share data with any other services other than Flight Aware.
Do you have the ability to see the configuration of my PiAware? If so, I’ll power it up and hope you can help me see the issue.
J
I meant e.g. port forwarding on your router so that you can access the Pi from outside your home network.
The piaware image does not give FA remote management access so there’s not much I can diagnose remotely. The limited information I can see (essentially, piaware logging) looks normal.
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Thanks again obj!
I do not have any port forwarding on my connection. Heck, I haven’t even worked out ssh yet.
I’ll give a fresh download and new SD card a try and report back.
Thanks again.
J
I had a similar problem. I installed Darkstat from post #3 above and it will give you a graph of how your system is sending and receiving data. It also has a tab to show the web sites/ip addresses interacting with your pi system. Amazing to see how the pi is being hit, as there were 3 pages of web sites with associated data shown. It has been a big help cleaning up what is going on with my receiver/pi. Have fun out there.
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Thanks Astro!
I had to giggle at myself after reading your recommendation for DarkSat.
Ya see, I still don’t have the ssh thing worked out yet. (I know I’m dumb…Mama drank while prego with me) but I think it’s related to a previous reply to me about ssh.
I think notepad is adding a .txt file extention that I haven’t worked out a solution for yet.
Many thanks for everyone’s input…I’ll get it figured out eventually.
J
My main receiver pushes about 4Gb of data/day so around 120Gb/month. That’s down from 20Gb/day after I blocked direct access to the aircraft json file.
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