Fine Tuning the Pre-Amplifier

[muckypaws]

Hello All, I’m using an External Aerial connected to the Pre-Amplifier, Filter and FlightAware Pro USB Stick to my Pi4 and I’m getting great results.

However there seems to be some parameters that can be changed to amend the gain.

What recommendations do you have for fine tuning the gain to optimise fully my set up?

Thanks

[foxhunter]

Setting the gain properly is very often try&error

It heavily depends on the area and the possible obstacles including frequencies around you.
A good starting point is installing the graphs1090 of @wiedehopf he provides on his Github page.
Then change the gain for one day and compare the results.
You should also check on heywhatsthat.com your max. possible range

There are also some great threads in this forum with plenty of information. e.g.

Thoughts on optimizing gain

The topic of gain comes up often enough and unlike some i don’t like the gain optimization script. Aircraft fading in and out of view make short term number gathering not that useful. The metric i like most for optimizing gain is the percentage of what dump1090 calls “strong_signals”. Those “strong_signals” are messages that get close to getting clipped. If you don’t care about some background you can scroll down to the next post for the HOWTO This is a clipped signal, the wa…

For Beginners - How to Set / Change Gain

Most likely you won’t get good range anyway because of the buildings. It might be beneficial to reduce gain quite a bit further if you want to receive all the close-in signals. See this thread for some advice on the topic: Thoughts on optimizing gain - #2 by wiedehopf (the first post of the linked thread is some more explanation on the topic)

[wiedehopf]

I’d probably add this: Automatic gain optimization for readsb and dump1090 fa · wiedehopf/adsb-scripts Wiki · GitHub

And this: GitHub - wiedehopf/tar1090: Provides an improved webinterface for use with ADS-B decoders readsb / dump1090-fa

[ve4gls]

Noticed with the latest Piaware 5.0 the script for % strong messages doesn’t seem to work.
It’s a great way to tune the gain on the 1090 receiver.
Actually just tried it again and now it does work. Odd…