Help newbie get on the right path

[tomvdhorst]

you could install graphs1090 in order to see the performance of the setup

GitHub - wiedehopf/graphs1090: Graphs for readsb / dump1090-fa / dump1090...

Install it. let it run for 24 hrs and check if your setup is around 5% of strong messages in the top graph. If the percentage is higher, reduce gain to get closer to the 5% if it is lower then 5% you might increase the gain a little.

Here’s a discussion with some links in regard to gain:

Huge increase on "bad" messages > -3dBFS after gain adjustment from 49.6 to max

Well that’s not true either. Above a certain gain, you might just get more internal noise, but not more real signal. No not really. You don’t want the planes close by to overload your receiver. Low and close flying planes are in the horizontal plane of the antenna (roughly). Those can overload the receiver, you would see it on the local map as the track is interrupted. And generally, with >5% of the red messages, often the message rate from close by planes goes down.