Wondering if anyone could shed some light on my receiver. As seen in the images one can see a very definite gap in Air traffic in a V shape towards Lethbridge in the SE. There are a couple of other spots I think I should be receiving data and I am not. I have gotten up to 228nm in the north but struggling to get 150nm in the East where its just flat prairies. I have the Max expected range boundary on for reference at 40000ft in blue on the 1 image. I know I’m limited in the west by mountains.
I’ve ordered a LNA and 1090 filter which should be in next week but am running a FA pro stick plus that has both already, putting those close to the antenna. Thanks
What is the antenna and where is it? Inside, the attic or outside at what height? Do you use auto-gain or hard set your own gain? Are you running 1090 Graphs?
Unfortunately it is in the Attic (Damn HOA). We’re in a 3 story townhouse and I’ve calc’d the height of the antenna to be about 37ft above ground. I put it in as an open space as I could in the Attic & couldn’t see anything that would definitively block it.
I do believe I use Autogain as I have never manually changed it. I am running 1090graphs and it says the gain is at 49.6.
I have a hospital about 200m south of me but its directly south, not South East where I have the issues. Thought I might be getting RF blockage but then would expect it all to the South.
Another possibility is that the reason you don’t see traffic in a particular sector is because planes don’t fly there. Example, in my area (North San Diego county), I generally don’t see aircraft directly south of me. The only aircraft I occasionally see there are Military aircraft flying in race tracks. It would seem that a plane taking off from San Diego Int and flying to Hawaii would cross that area, but they never do. Instead they fly up to Catalina Island and then turn southwest towards Hawaii. Same way with a return from Hawaii – they fly over Catalina Island then come down the coast to San Diego.
Not saying that this type of thing is absolutely happening in your case, but it’s a possibility.
I assume you’re not getting hung up on magnetic vs true?
Without an exact location it’s really hard to speculate if it’s the hospital or not. (not asking you to give it)
I’d guess it is.
200m from you and such a large block of blocking materials is sure gonna produce a gap in reception as you have.
So my best guess is you’re just mistaken in regards to the direction.
If it’s something in the roofing, you should be able to move the blind spot by moving the antenna either east or west within the attic.
Did you compare your actual range outline with the terrain based maximum via heywhatsthat.com?
In my area i have a similar layout with gaps, but these are explained by mountains and elevations around.
Your gap in the south east is somewhat sharp, so it could be something else close to you. The one to the north west look pretty normal dpeneding on the area.
I expect you are very much correct on the Hospital having a significant impact on any potential signal blocking in that general direction. The hospital will absolutely be a RF rich environment!
How do you enable it if you are using dump-fa?
I thought it relied on the readsb --range-outline-hours= function.
I can’t see an option to enable it in tar1090 when using dump-fa.
I have a Flightaware Flightfeeder running on my local network. I also have a laptop running Ubuntu 22.04 and have a Flightaware 978 site running on it. After installing tar1090 on the laptop, I can access the 978 feed on the tar1090 website. How do I make the Flightaware feed available to tar1090 as I can not install anything on the Flightfeeder receiver?
I use dump1090-fa and piaware to feed FlightAware. I then added feeding for adsb.fi which added tar1090 as the web interface. The web interface has the range outline feature.
I have tar1090 installed too. I wonder if we are talking about the same thing. I do have the “heywhatsthat” theoretical maximum range outline but I don’t appear to have an option to display the actual range achieved over the last day. That is the one I thought needs readsb.
Looking at the installation script for adsb.fi, their feed client is based on readsb. I strongly suspect that is why you have the max range display and I don’t.
I am feeding to airplanes.live and adsb.fi from the Flightfeeder pi through the laptop and have the tar1090 maps on both of those sites, but I do not have the range outline feature.
I have installed tar1090 on the laptop and am feeding uat978 to Flightaware with a Nooelec v5 sdr connected to the laptop. I have the tar1090 map with the range outline feature for my 978 feed only.
