dump1090 command line arguments on piaware

FlightAware ADS-B Flight Tracking
1

I’m running dump1090 via the installed piaware service on my raspberry pi. I noticed that it’s automatically launched with the following command line arguments:


/usr/bin/dump1090 --quiet --net --gain -10

Where are these arguments set/how can I change these arguments (e.g. to include the ppm correction)?

2

edit out

3

They’re in /etc/init.d/fadump1090.sh. You’ll need sudo to edit that file to change that parameters, then run


sudo /etc/init.d/fadump1090.sh restart

to restart dump1090 with your new command line.

4

What’s the purpose of /etc/init.d/piaware if I have /etc/init.d/fadump1090.sh ?

5

Piaware is the program that takes the output from dump1090 and forwards it to FlightAware.

Dump1090 could be run as a strictly standalone app if you wanted to do that, but piaware won’t work without data coming from dump1090.

6

Oh ok, that makes sense. Thanks! :slight_smile:

7

Has anyone made any changes to the default piaware dump1090 settings that have provided positive results? What advantages does dump1090-mutability provide over the stock piaware SD image?

Cheers!
LitterBug

8

Back when I was playing around with settings in dump1090, the biggest improvement by far was setting gain to -10. I saw about a 50% improvement in planes, although that was before adding a high pass filter.

The gain of -10 is the default these days, so not too much to gain (NPI) by playing with the dump1090 settings, although the settings for --lat & --lon appear to be passed to FlightAware these days.

Mutability has a lot of nice features in the local display along with oversampling support. It improved my reception by about 5% (from a fairly optimized setup) with no other changes. It was a little tricky to configure at first, until I figured out the format of /etc/default/dump1090-mutability. I would definitely say the upgrade to mutability was worthwhile.

9

I like playing with the arguments in the fadump1090.sh file, but tend to loose track of what I did when etc.

So I hacked a quick one-liner and did a vi on the extension.js file

Started by creating a file that shows the last time the fadump1090 was modified and I then pull the PROG_ARG line from the file and write this information to the pubic_html folder in a file called args.txt.

sudo vi /etc/init.d/fadump1090.sh

insert the code below , between the line ** log_begin_msg $status** and return in the start function.


stat -c '%y' /etc/init.d/fadump1090.sh > /usr/share/dump1090/public_html/args.txt && echo "<br>" >> /usr/share/dump1090/public_html/args.txt && grep ^PROG_ARGS /etc/init.d/fadump1090.sh | awk -F"\"" '{print $2}' >> /usr/share/dump1090/public_html/args.txt

sudo vi /usr/share/dump1090/public_html/extension.js

Insert the code below above function extendedInitalize() {


    xmlhttp = new XMLHttpRequest();
    xmlhttp.open("GET","args.txt",true);
    xmlhttp.onreadystatechange=function() {
        if (xmlhttp.readyState==4) {
    var info = "<HR>"+ xmlhttp.responseText;
            document.getElementById('plane_extension').innerHTML=info;
        }
    }
    xmlhttp.send(null);

sudo /etc/init.d/fadump1090.sh restart

This allows me to see the arguments in dump’s map on ip:8080

ICAO Flight Squawk Altitude Speed Track Msgs Seen
00c454 6672 1774 317 228 26 0
00b25e 3766 4326 0 29 35
04002f ETH808 2676 6892 800 21 1711 4
00c463 CAW127 5432 7387 793 224 1298 1
00b026 SAA160 2625 7707 811 24 3008 2
00a509 0607 10357 0 1441 18
2015-04-05 14:23:27.761016118 +0200
–quiet --net

Tested this on chrome and firefox, please backup any files before you edit them, use at own risk.

Later Ferdie