I notice that most sites are now Flightfeeder (yellow). Are they all using the Flightaware antenna? Are there still any homebrewers building and using their own antennas?
I sue a combination of Flightaware and Vinnant antennas. Vinnant antennas have the same performance but come at a lower price.
https://vinnant.sk/
There are a lot of people that build their own antennas as well 
I have built a collinear vertical thats not bad and am working on a collinear dipole that models 2.5dB gain more than the current one. My antenna is only 1m above my roof and my HF antennas are in the way of middle distance signals in a NNW direction but I get up to 220nm’s if the aircraft is at 45000ft. Strange thing was getting good signals from a plane at 30000ft north of Lesotho at 211nm and when I checked radio horizon with earth curvature it was not possible along that line. RF is a weird and wonderful thing. ++ New max is now 247nm from a plane at 40000ft
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6 or 7 years ago there were few commercial antennas for 1090Mhz. The ones that were available were expensive. Homebrew was the best way to go to make a cheap feeder.
There were several of us (abcd567 in particular) who dived into the theory and made a lot of waste copper wire! It was great fun. I still have a feeder running on a 12 segment home brew CoCo. https://uk.flightaware.com/adsb/stats/user/triggers#stats-15612
It’s easy to just buy a complete kit from Flightaware.
I suppose it depends why you do something.
I started on 1090 last month and I have built six different antennas as well as a lot of scrap. I test straight onto dump1090 offline. I am experimenting to see what I can do antenna wise. Buying the kit defeats the object for me. What I am enjoying is getting signals from 30000ft aircraft at 211nm and over the horizon.
I completely understand your fascination to experiment. I spent many happy hours snipping & soldering bits of wire.
I guess you have found the many posts highlighting different designs of antenna and homebrew filters?.
I’ve seen a few antenna posts, have not seen any filters. Being in a remote location has it’s advantages when it comes to noise. I have not tried coax collinears as yet. I model my attempts using Eznec and then make adjustments using the analyzer. I then run dump1090 to an RTL-SDR or just use the HackRF One to see what planes it reads. Using the HackRF one is useful as you can walk around with the antenna without a computer.
There are a few links and other discussions about filters in this thread from 2016:
CoCo Antenna - 2, 4, 6, 8 & 12 Elements - Simulation Results
Coaxial Collinear (CoCo) Antenna - Hyps & Facts
Coco (Coaxial Collinear) Antenna - Tips & Tricks
Roll your own Interdigital filter
The Final Filter Shootout
Designing cavity filter, may I know more about yours?
RF Scan of Various Combinations of Dongles, Filter, and LNA
Thanks for the links. Interesting. I have been attempting to determine the dielectric constant of PVC conduit when inserting an antenna into it and I find that the bigger the gap between the wire (20mm, 25mm or 32mm conduit) and the conduit sleeve the lower the capacitive effect and if parts of the wire, for instances coils touch the pvc the effect is greater which makes it very difficult to determine how to setup the modelling for any antenna that is inside conduit. How to determine a standard?
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