I’m learning this stuff as I go but I have a long way to yet. Managed to get MLAT planes in VRS but I only see MLAT/ADS-B planes within my own PiAware/antenna coverage. I’m wondering if there’s a way to add a feed from FlightAware so I can see planes far away, sort of like a global view like you’d see on the flight tracking phone app - I’d like to be able to move the VRS map far from my location and see approaching planes from well off. Can this be done or can I only view the area of the globe my antenna covers? I’d use an app but I’m interested in seeing military planes approach me here as they come up the Eastern Seaboard.
That’s correct, your local receiver will only show ADS-B you received and MLAT positions you contributed to.
For what you want to see, I’d recommend using the map on Live Flight Tracker - FlightAware with position-only flights enabled on your account.
Thanks for the reply. No way to see MLATed planes approaching from a ways off then short of getting aquainted with people around me to get their IPs to add to VRS?
MLAT is provided over 30105 for beast (check for the others below).
I setup a 2nd receiver (and a combined receiver for ADS-B and MLAT) on my VRS.
You get separate range plots for each.
Multilateration Settings
The “mlat-results-format” configuration setting controls how multilateration results are provided. It is a space-separated list, where each item is something that can be passed to the “–results” option of mlat-client:
,connect,host:port - makes an outgoing connection to host:port
,listen,port - listens for incoming connections on the given port
Supported protocols are:
basestation: the “port 30003” BaseStation format
ext_basestation: an extended version of the BaseStation format that includes mlat-specific data
beast: results encoded as DF18 ADS-B messages, Beast binary format
The default settings set up three items:
beast,connect,localhost:30104 - this feeds multilateration results back to the local dump1090 for display on the map
beast,listen,30105 - this provides a Beast binary format feed of multilateration results that can be used by external systems, e.g., VRS
ext_basestation,listen,30106 - like 30105, but in a different format
It should not be necessary to change the multilateration settings in most cases.
Thanks Jon, I’ll save this for future reference.
If you want more results from a sort of global perspective to show on your VRS, fire up another FA site using Plane Plotter to feed it. Then you can route Plane Plotter global results back into your VRS. Not the same as all FA results, but many of the PP sites are also feeding FA anyway.
That’s brilliant! One of those “should have thought of that myself” things but as I said I’m still getting ramped up on all this.
I already have a PlanePlotter feed to FA from when I used my PC to feed (before I got my Pi a month ago), I was assigned a second site when I set up my PiAware. I’ve pushed my Pi to PlanePlotter to share with (which I know is redundant since my Pi and PC are dealing with the same antenna/receiver), and I was going to turn it off but that’s a great idea. Do you know what VRS settings I’ll need to use (Beast, Raw, Basestation etc) and what port the default would be? I’ll google in the meantime but in case I get nothing I thought I’d ask.
Update: got it working. I set up a rebroadcast server (which I think is required?) and created a new receiver from PlanePlotter in VRS using local port 9741. Now my VRS ties everything together so it shows planes (albeit non MLAT) from my local machine’s PlanePlotter install PLUS MLAT data and ADS-B data from my Pi. Thanks again for suggesting!
Edit - at least I thought it might be working. I’d expect planes I see on the map in PlanePlotter to also show in VRS but that doesn’t seem to be the case even though I can see the messages increasing in the PlanePlotter receiver I created and added to my merged feed. Grr. I’ll take any thoughts anyone has.
Edit 2 - I was rebroadcasting my Merged feed. If I set PlanePlotter as the receiver to rebroadcast it connects on port 9741 but the message count stays at zero. In VRS I set Receiver as an option and I have planes with FA MLAT and RPi but I haven’t seen any with the PlanePlotter tag yet. It’s definitely not getting through.
Looks like maybe this can’t be done, unless someone knows better:
forum.virtualradarserver.co.uk/v … .php?t=340