Should be interesting to see how long my station on Bogue Sound (Near Lat 34.6882 Long -76.88987) stays operational in this storm. Forecasted winds currently peak at 100mph by tonite and stay above 75mph through tomorrow. Not looking good at the moment. I took my other station down as the antenna masts would snap off.
Needless to say it will be down if power or internet is lost or if the structure its attached to is lost, with no anticipated uptime.
Still a decent amount of air traffic up and down the coast, although staying 100 miles inland at this point.
Update: still chugging. and for those that say that range is greatly impacted by weather, at the moment in the middle of a hurricane I am getting aircraft 240 nautical miles out. Of course there’s nothing flying within 100 nm of there.
Homemade 8 element Collinear, 15 feet of RG6 coax and a FA Prostick set to AGC jammed in a RPi 3B+, located maybe 12 feet above sealevel. I have no technical explanation for it other than location and salt water.
UPDATE: Just lost power so station is down for who knows how long.
It was a good run while it lasted.
Station 82531 went down approximately 20:45 UTC 09/13/2018. There is no anticipated uptime. This is the last screenshot I captured, and overlaid Hurricane Florence at about the same point in time.
I’m very sorry to hear that! Hopefully all left before the hurricane hit, or if they stayed, no injuries. Everything else can be replaced, not easily and with a lot of sacrifice sometimes, but replaceable.
Happy to report that station 82531 is now back online- miraculously house, Rpi and homemade antenna basically survived the hurricane despite nearly 100mph wind gusts. Power was apparently restored around 9:30am EST, system auto-booted and started chugging.
The FA antenna is rated for 110mph wind. It is more common to have branches hitting the antenna and other types of mounting failures than the antenna breaking.
Great to see your home and your ADSB site make it through the hurricane.
Thank you. In this case the station antenna was my homemade 8 section collinear of mongrel coax housed in a 3/4" PVC pipe housing. It shouldn’t have worked at all and now its survived a hurricane, which it also should not have.
I am updating its “spec sheet” to include a 100 mph wind rating.
