Hi, was looking for these stats but can’t find it easily hence decided to trigger the question! I am currently during daytime, following between 80-100 airplanes (using a 30cm telescopic antenna on the roof and a raspberrypi 1b with a dongle), is this typical, expected? 
How about you guys? what is your average number of planes spotted by your station? 
Cheers,
Gizmo
Number of planes at any location depends on following factors. These factors vary from location to location, so no figures can be given which is applicable globally.
The easiest way to know what you want is to check number of planes received by several other stations / receivers near your location.
Right now, 426
But don’t despair, I have a decent setup with a very high external aerial.
Go to your stats page by clicking the link below
https://www.flightaware.com/adsb/stats/user/PTGizmo
Scroll down to following, and click on the names of nearby feeders. You will see their stats and can compare it with yours.
You mean the one which looks like an inverted umbrella?
Nah, that’s long gone and wasn’t any good for ADS-B anyway. All it did was keep any upwards falling rain off my other aerial
Fully understand…I have been moving my my “toy antenna” a few roof tiles up and makes a difference, (can spot around +10 planes just by going 1-2 tiles up the roof..
Jesus!
I live 30km from Frankfurt’s Airport…if I only could place a bigger antenna on the roof of my house…
Tomorrow I will try putting it on the attic (the highest point), but unfortunately don’t have windows in there so will need to make a tradeoff…2nd floor over the root tiles or 3rd floor but inside an empty attic…
Go for the attic 3rd floor. These frequencies seem to penetrate fairly well. A heavy rain will increase signal attenuation somewhat, but you will still get good reception. Height above ground is your significant friend and helps your reception.
Same here, similar location. But don’t expect too much. The area here is covered bvy different obstacles.
I was playing around with different antennas, cables, LNA and other stuff. At the end the area is pretty much limited by the surroundings and the chances of improvement are not that big.
Best results i have achieved by using an Airspy Stick with a filtered LNA and a 6.5dB antenna. But the reception was just 10% higher than any other (and cheaper) solution. Windows didn’t matter to me. i had it also directly under the roof with no windows. But the reception was as good as outside. You should put it in the middle of the space. The closer you come to walls etc. the lower the signal will be.
You should also check heywhatsthat.com for your max. range based on the location. If you see aircraft already at the edge, you have the optimal setup.
Hi foxhunter!
Indeed…I just took my raspberrypi to the attic…and used a USB power brick to power it for a few mins as I did not have a power socket close. Even in the middle of the attic, I was basically catching around 60 planes…30 less then if I put the antenna outside (close to my roof window)…
The interesting bit is indeed range is much more limited..I could only “see” planes up to 100km (whereas when placing the antenna outside on the roof, I can “see” planes up to 200km some even close to 300km)…but actually I could now spot planes located in the “west” something that is new to me…
So indeed, the attic is a good compromise…but placing a proper antenna (I will re-se a mast that I already have setup for a sat disk) outside in a even higher position should yield better results…
Actually from my roof-window, I can see the planes taking-off every 1m or so, so have almost a direct line of sight to the airport..
Anyway, I have taken the antenna again to the roof, slightly below my roof window…Here’s how it looks now…:
As can be seen, clearly…I have my antenna “deployed” on the roof facing west (and can cover from north to south…now I have to find a way to improve the “visibility” to the east and also increase the range…
Hopefully, this can help:
attached to this:
so…currently spotting 88/90 during the morning…and then it decreases of course…due to the lower traffic in the afternoon…and at 23:00 local…there are no more flights from Frankfurt…so it’s peace and quiet…except for the high-altitude airplanes crossing the skies…
And here’s a nice photo of my crappy antenna ahahahha:
Having the antenna close to this satellite bowl can cause issues and reduced reception, at least in this direction.
If you are using the longer Ziisor antenna with 5.5dB gain should be sufficient. That’s the same value as the Jetvision antenna (also used on Flightfeeders).
This is how it looks from my side (status as of 5:30pm) with max. range of around 350km. My location is west of Mainz. At this time 157 aircraft were seen on the map.
But over night only few aircraft are seen, which is normal over Germany:
I also highly recommend to install graphs1090 which gives a good overview of the
overall performance.
seem to be that easter season and the summer flight plan kicked in.
So depending on your setup and the environment you should see similar results
180 aircraft live visible:
(Map is from my main feeder, a Jetvision Airsquitter, just in case you are confused)
ice…:), yup, I bought the longer one (55cm)…also have an old-unused telescopic stainless steel pipe, which I could attach to the mast and slide it upwards (as needed) to “lift” the antenna even higher…I hope this doesn’t become a “lightning magnet”
Need to think about it still…also need to replace my raspberrypi (the spare RPi I had around is a V1b, which clearly isn’t coping…with all the load…my fr24 feeder just went offline and can’t even connect via ssh as the cpu must be 100% at all time…
So RPI4b 4GB is arriving tomorrow together with a 3A psu and alu-case
I’ll try graphs1090 on the RPi4 once it arrives
Are both graphs that you attached to your msg, taken from graphs1090?
Cheers from the Bergstrasse..
Gizmo
I’m actually super surprised with the number of airplanes flying above our heads around Frankfurt Rhein-Main…never thought there were so many..
Good choice on the Rpi 4b 4g.
The first image is the map of tar1090 (an alternative map display to dump1090-fa). The second one is the graph of the last 24 hours from graphs1090
And the last image was taken from a Jetvision device
If you look at the routes we have a lot international bypass in the Rhein Main Area. It’s one of the busiest areas in Europe.
As long as you are not planning to run an Airspy stick, a smaller Raspberry would be sufficient as well. But as prices dropped, it doesn’t matter any longer.
Did you write somewhere which dongle you are using? This can also be a source for bad reception.
different location, not comparable
