I finally got around to mounting my antenna outside on the roof. I wasn’t able to reach the apex of my taller roof. I may buy a ground mounted mast to run up the side of the house of the shorter roof. Without having to use guy wires, I think I will be able to extend the mast about 10 feet above the shorter roofline, which would put the antenna above the apex of the taller roof.
This is my current setup:
• PiAware image (the Raspberry Pi is inside the house)
• ADSBexchange 1090/978 N-Type antenna
• 6ft LMR-400 Ultra Flex cable
• Uputronics 1090 Mhz filtered preamp
• 30ft LMR-240Ultra Flex cable
• RTL-SDR Blog V3 dongle for 1090 Mhz
Compared to my last setup, with this setup my range seems to be about 50 nm farther and my message rate has increased. Does the graph below indicate that my noise level is too high? If so, perhaps I will get a barrel filter from FlightAware.
EDIT: I think my gain was too high. I tried a number of times to lower the gain using the steps in this post (For Beginners - How to Set/Change Gain) but the gain seemed to stay the same. It wasn’t until I saw this post (Disabling Adaptive Gain?) that I figured out that I needed to disable adaptive gain to set the gain manually. I currently have my gain set at 32.8 dB.
Do the graphs indicate other opportunities to optimize my setup?