Internal/External aerial - Not as different as you'd expect.

[jonhawkes2030]

@keithma

I’ve done gain optimization but I think that’s a bit hit and miss really. The external one is running at 48 and the internal one at 44.5 and I adjusted them for position counts rather than messages or aircraft.

I think the big thing that makes the internal one work so well is the fact that there’s no coax involved. The amplifier and receiver are quite literally at the aerial. If I can do something similar outside then that should give really good results - There will be a short coax tail from the base of the collinear but that will only be 3ft or so of LDF-250 so the loss is negligible. I can be fairly sure I’ll need to reduce the gain a tad when that happens.

I remember a guy from early last year did something similar.
ads-b-flight-tracking-f21/pre-amps-vs-low-loss-t36637.html
He powered his RPI via POE and put the setup in a plastic box on his tower.
He gets pretty good range too flightaware.com/adsb/stats/user/BellCountyTX