FlightAware 1090Mhz filter added

FlightAware ADS-B Flight Tracking
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I’m getting decent numbers and coverage on my windowsill setup, covering most of England and Wales, the Isle of Man, and some of Scotland and Ireland. I’ve got a Uputronics filtered preamp and the Pro Stick Plus, and gain is set to maximise messages and the spread of RSSI across the range of the stick.

On a whim I ran that heatmap script again for the first time in ages using the same gain setting. The scan showed some faint GSM signals and in-band noise plus a couple of signals in there (the 1066Mhz signal that has been spotted before in someone else’s setup). All these went away when running a scan with nothing attached to the Pro Stick.

So I decided to get the FlightAware dark blue 1090Mhz filter and see if that did anything. The GSM signals and in-band noise are now gone. I’ve re-tested the gain setting and it’s unchanged, and so far numbers and performance don’t appear any worse. I also treated my Pi to a mini fan to help it deal with the lovely weather, which you can see in the pic below.

The filter feels well made and is a nice bit of kit. It will be interesting to see how it pans out over the next month, and what the numbers and range plot end up looking like compared to before the filter.

(Note I included links to the items mentioned for anyone finding this in future and interested in exploring them)

GSM (before and after filter)

gsm
gsm1048×404 64 KB

ADS-B (before and after filter)

adsb
adsb1294×409 97.7 KB

Filter in place

pi
pi480×640 63.3 KB

1 Like
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Interesting. You are filtering twice between the antenna and RPi.

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Three times, in fact, the Uputronics is a filtered preamp. It looks like they do a decent job of attenuating out of band stuff. Curious to see if this filter changes anything. It was low cost enough to be worth the experiment!

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Before i moved to a Jetvision device i had several other solutions including the blue FA stick and the dark blue filter.

For my location the dark blue passive filter did nothing. i did not get a higher range or a better reception.
Only the Uputronics with additional USB power increased it.
For an airspy you have to have a filtered LNA, otherwise it is almost blind.

The Uputronics is now in front of my Jetvision device and works perfect.

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