I have a RPi 3B+ with FA “Blue” Dongle, running PiAware 7.2 1090 and 978. Antenna is about 15’ up in the air with only small blockage from the house (~580ft up) between KDFW and KAFW. 1090 is on a Nooelec 9dBi ADS-B Antenna and the 978 is on a RadarBox Antenna. Position count went from 22164 positions and 323 flights to 12411 positions and 253 flights, comparing last Sat to today. Only change is I pushed the antenna up about 4-5ft. Also Skyware is only showing distances of 60-90nm. I have an almost duplicate of this setup a few miles away with just a little stubby 5dbi antenna inside a building and getting 20-30 flights cover 215nm and 30000 positions / 381 flights for the same time hour slot as the one mentioned above.
Install Graphs1090 and show some screenshots of the various settings and performance.
Without that detail it will be hard to see where there is room for improvement.
Maybe the gain settings are too high, the graphs analysis will tell you more
Thanks, sorry meant to include. See attached. the gap in the graphs is went I took it offline to adjust the antenna height. The numbers / range were already lower then I thought they should be even before hand.
I would start with checking every connection. Maybe one of the connectors is loosely tightend and not making a decent connection.
Maybe this will fix it.
If you have spares then swap the items out one by one. Check again after 2 hrs ( minimum measurement time in Graphs1090) to see if it improves.
Still early at your side of the ocean so you have the day ahead of you to see improvements
That happened to me after I upgraded my antenna, cable and added an Airspy. Performance was much worse. Turned out one SMA connector was not screwed down all the way.
