My request for a FlightFeeder from Flight Aware has been approved and I’m wondering if I can use this in place of the pro stick on a raspberry pi setup. I have a flat screen tv I’m wanting to use as a monitor for flight tracking in my line service office. Any suggestions will be appreciated!
Not sure I understand the question - are you wanting to pull the data from the Flightfeeder to a separate Pi, in order to do something with it? Or are you just wanting to display the SkyAware page on the flat screen tv?
I have one of the 978 FilghtFeeders, and have not found any open ports, or any way to pull the data into my VRS server, but I can access the SkyAware map from other computers on my network via a web browser. If you just want to display the map, you should be able to install the vanilla Raspberry Pi desktop on your Pi and just use its web browser.
If you are trying to get to the actual data in order to use it in some other way, I don’t have an answer, but I would love to learn how to do that too.
Sorry, I am a beginner at this! Simply displaying the SkyAware page would work on the flat screen for my purpose. I guess now I’m wondering is there any difference in the data that you would get from the USB pro-stick PiAware versus running the SkyAware map off of the web browser?
You can access the “map” of the Flightaware Flightfeeder from other devices within the same network (laptop, TV etc) - exactly same as accessing PiAware map from other devices on your network
“IPaddressofyourFeeder”:8080.
Similarly, if away from the local network, you can also access “Skyware anywhere” by logging into your Flightaware page, and then accessing the appropriate link (though that artificially increases your data statistics)
So the Pro Stick is a radio receiver that plugs into a computer (the Pi, typically), and to its own antenna. The FlightFeeder is a Pi in a plastic box with (I believe) a Pro Stick inside, and comes with an antenna and a length of cable.
With both antennas at the same location, same height, same line of sight to the horizon, and with the FlightFeeder and the Pi + Pro Stick set to similar gain values, the data should be essentially the same - they should be “seeing” the same planes.
If one of them is a 1090 and the other is a 978 (which is my current config), the data is different because each is receiving from a subset of the total aircraft that are in range. In that case you are probably getting most of the available flights.
I know that some people do run multiple 1090 receivers at one location, but I suspect that their needs are fairly edge-case.
As mentioned by @dongerrard204, if your flat screen TV is a “smart” tv and has an onboard web browser, you could display the SkyAware map directly from the TV without the need for any additional computer.
One advantage to the standalone Pi + ProStick configuration in that case is that it allows you to use some non-FlightAware software that might better suit your needs. User @wiedehopf shares a utility called “Tar1090” that creates a more configurable SkayAware-style map, and I think I recall that it supports a sort of “kiosk” mode where the aircraft list can be hidden so that only the map itself is displayed. There are other 3rd party apps that can display statistics and status info, such as @wiedehopf’s Graphs1090, a Grafana Docker, RPIMonitor, VRS (Virtual Radar Server) and others. User @caius has scripts that plot various aspects of performance.
The FlightFeeder is good at doing what it does, and if that’s all you need, it’s fine. But it’s necessarily a black box. If you are going to want to slice/dice/display your data in any kind of different format, then building your own is the way to go.
Another option might be to get a Pi (even an inexpensive Pi Zero original would be OK for this purpose, or a Pi Zero W if you need wifi), install ADS-B decoder software such as dump1090-fa or readsb, and configure it to receive data from the FlightFeeder’s IP address and port rather than from the default localhost IP and port. Then you can do what you like with the data and have full administrative access to the Pi. You can find your FlightFeeder’s local IP on your feeder’s stats page in FlightAware under My ADS-B.
I don’t have a FlightFeeder 1090 to see if this works, but on my FlightFeeder 978 they seem to have all of the ports locked down - I am rescanning it tonight just to be sure.
Locked down as no other device can access the data that’s coming from its port? How would they even do that, encrypt its network connection so only FA can get to the data? That would put more load on the Pi that’s inside the Flightfeeder box.
I also don’t have a FlightFeeder box to experiment with, but to give an example I have a Pi with Raspbian OS and Piaware running on it along with readsb, and I run VirtualRadarServer on my PC. I just went into the VRS options and changed the IP address of the receiver from the default 127.0.0.1 localhost IP to the local IP of my Pi and left the port number 30003 alone and am seeing planes in VRS that are actually being tracked via the Pi. It seems to be that you should be able to do the same thing or similar with FlightFeeder.
It seems as though it should be that way, but it doesn’t appear to be. I have an RPI running the FA image and also a FlightFeeder 978. I have VRS running on a Debian VM and connected to the RPI and it works great. When I got my FF, I tried to add it to my VRS server so that I could seen combined 1090 and 978, and when I tried to create a connection to the FF by duplicating the RPI settings with the FF IP address, I got a “Network connection cannot be made” error, or something like that. I tried again yesterday to see if anything had changed, and it had not.
I suspect that they are pushing data to their site, rather than querying the device remotely. And if they need to access it for updates and such, my guess is that they maintain some kind of reverse tunnel that gives them command line access.
I am port scanning it right now with nmap, I will update with the results.
Streaming data from TCP ports are supported Frequently Asked Questions - FlightAware
30978/30979 should be open on your UAT FlightFeeder. Can you connect to those ports?
I just now found those. I am connected now, but it’s after dark and winter where I am, so It will be sometime tomorrow before I can verify.
Thanks for sharing that. I have been wondering for quite some time why FA would want to restrict access.
Is 30978 the primary data, and 30979 for MLAT? I’m apparently all by myself out here on the 978/MLAT side. My feeder reports that MLAT is enabled, but never says that it is synchronized with any other feeders.
30978 is the raw UAT data, 30979 is decoded UAT in JSON format
MLAT is disabled on UAT FlightFeeders since it’s only relevant to 1090 Mode S. The UI showing MLAT still enabled probably needs a bit of cleanup
Perfect, thank you! (20 char)
Edit to add: is the aircraft.json and stats.json files accessible as well? If so, can you share the path to them? (I am hoping that I didn’t ask this question before, and just forgot the answer - sorry, if that’s the case!)
That is exactly how the Jetvision Airsquitter works if you do not have a professional license.
This device is built on an Orange Pi and they use their own decoder program with feeders to FA, FR24 and Opensky integrated.
The ports are all closed and only the outbound to the given feeders work.
If you get a professional license this opens up the ports and you can access it with whatever you want.
Even installing something locally on the device doesn’t give you access to the ports.
Somewhat topic-drifty but I’ve just figured out how to add a second receiver using port 30106 in Basestation format in VRS, create a merged feed using both this and my ADS-B receiver, and tic the MLAT checkbox for the MLAT receiver. I’m watching the merged feed on the VRS map and waiting for my PiAware system to receive some MLAT positions to see if they show up in VRS.
Hats off to both the detailed VRS documentation and the FlightAware Advanced Configuration page for providing the info needed to set this up.
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This never changed anything on my VRS. Instead of this it crashed every several hours.
For MLAT i added a second receiver in VRS going to the same machine on the MLAT port
No problem.
< ip address>/skyaware/data/aircraft.json
< ip address>/skyaware/data/stats.json
Sorry, I seem to be having a ‘dumb day’ - do these urls work with the UAT FlightFeeder? If I point my web browser at these urls on my 1090 RPI I can see the JSON data, but changing the IP to my FlightFeeder, both URLs give me 404/not found errors.
Also, the page at this link
doesn’t mention ports 30978/30979 at all, so I just want to make sure that we are still talking about the same thing. I apologize for being dense!
My fault 
For 978, it should be
< ip address>/skyaware978/data/aircraft.json
< ip address>/skyaware978/data/stats.json
Thank you again. One last question though - I can definitely see the aircraft.json at this url, but the stats.json still gives me the 404 error. Does that file exist on the UAT FlightFeeder?