I bought one on eBay from a guy in Slovakia called stanislavpalo130. It has worked well for me and cost less than £20 including delivery, Note: it has now gone up to just over £20.
The price for that one over here is $71.50 US with free shipping from Bulgaria (shocking) - although it may very well take it a month to get here.
I’m using a home-brew eight-element collinear in a PVC pipe on the roof that has served me very well. If I were to order one of those, I would just have to open it up to see what I paid for. PVC is easy enough to re-seal.
Has anyone ever opened one of these Internet-purchase ADS-B antennas to see what they paid for?
I have one without the ground plane and the guy is actually quite helpful, his English is a bit off but nevertheless he’s handy and I wouldn’t recommend taking it apart i broke one doing that haha. I did send him a request for it and he found a work-around for what I wanted.
@Mattbna the one above without a ground-plane is a J-Pole antenna which does have quite a good coverage when in clear sight of the sky. I’ve got atleast 150nm-200nm easy although my area doesn’t help. Can’t comment on the 5/8 antenna with ground plane but I am tempted to get one.
I would definitely provide some earthing/grounding of the antenna - f only to deal with static build up. Without it your raspberry Pi Ethernet port will had a tendency to sacrifice itself to protect everything else.
Yes - especially as the antenna is higher than the roof ridge, I’d prefer to err on the side of caution also…
So, what’s the best way to do this - what do you external antenna guys do?
Out of interest, the link I found suggesting “not to bother” …
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I always ask have you ever had a problem with a TV antenna or FM stereo antenna?
If the answer is no then why would your adsb receiver be any more exposed?
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Those who like to declare that safety items are useless, are fools. Or grounding increases the chance of a strike…no. At the energy levels of lightning (the lightning’s prospective), everything is grounded. It just an issue of how you would like to direct that energy (to prevent a fire). Would you like your walls and framing to conduct the strike to ground, or would you perfer a 4 ga solid copper wire to direct it. I personally don’t like my walls to be electrified (due to the inherent fire afterwards). The NEC is there to keep you safe.
well, it would block static from going down the core of the antenna coax, and to some extent the antenna might be grounded through what ever it’s mounted on - but with a home made antenna that’s insulated from it’s support, running off an insulated power source - the best ground could easily be the Ethernet port.