Flightaware Blue Dongle

Hello, I’m using the Flightaware blue dongle but I have no intention of installing Piaware since my current setup works just fine, is it possible to adjust gain without Piaware and what gain is it set at by default?

Dongle’s gain is controlled by receiver-decoder software.

Which receiver-decoder software you have installed, dump1090 (malcom robson), dump1090-mutability, dump1090-fa, modeSDeco2, or something else?

The gain setting is configured every time the dump1090 program is started. With piaware the configuration settings are all in one place and will start dump1090 with the piaware configuration values.

You can use a command like “ps aux | grep dump1090” to see what your current program and settings are. The -g with a number after is the current gain settings. You would need to find how the program was started on your system to modify the gain setting.

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I just now checked your stats page https://flightaware.com/adsb/stats/user/matthewjohnston89 , both your stations 65892 and 66043 show:
Feeder Type: PiAware (SD Card) 3.5.1

You already have piaware and dump1090-fa installed. You dont have to install Piaware again. Simply shutdown your Pi, replace current dongle with Blue ProStick, and power up. Then see/adjust gain as follows:

To see gain setting:

sudo systemctl status dump1090-fa -l
#In output of above command, the last line will display gain value set.

OR

sudo piaware-config -show rtlsdr-gain

Default gain value is -10 (AGC)

To set gain to a value N

sudo piaware-config rtlsdr-gain N

sudo systemctl restart dump1090-fa

Permissible value of N is between 0 and 50. You can use -10 if you want to set gain to AGC

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