I recently install the latest version of Raspbian and PiAware on my Raspberry Pi 3 using a Nano 2 Antenna.
The Flight Aware View didn’t work and I noticed that the dump1090-fa was not producing output.
After playing with dump1090-fa --interactive
I noticed the FA parameters being used produced no output. After setting the gain to nothing (removing it) output was produced.
Also noticed that the /run/dump1090-fa directory had NOT been created during the install/build process.
After manually creating /run/dump1090-fa then the FA HTML started working (since that is where the json files need to be written)
Sorry I don’t have all the versions - just assume latest as of this date.
What’s your dump1090-fa configuration? What does it log (to syslog, usually) on startup?
When you say that “flight aware view didn’t work”, what exactly do you mean?
/run/dump1090-fa is not created on install, it is created immediately before dump1090-fa starts by systemd and cleaned up when it halts, which leads me to suspect that dump1090-fa wasn’t actually running when you thought it was.
I edited the /etc/default/dump1090-fa file to remove the reference to gain, because otherwise my Nano2 didn’t return anything except perhaps one or two hits per hour at most:
dump1090-fa configuration
This is read by the systemd service file as an environment file,
and evaluated by some scripts as a POSIX shell fragment.
If you are using a PiAware sdcard image, this config file is regenerated
on boot based on the contents of piaware-config.txt; any changes made to this
OK, so “is almost but not completely deaf” is different to “does not work”. The default config sets --gain -10 which enables AGC (which isn’t really auto-gain for reasons described elsewhere). Maybe either the AGC on the Nano2 is nonfunctional, or your setup overloads the input stage when configured like that.
If you use the piaware sdcard image, does it work?
Thanks for the reply. You’re right, I should have said “the webpage produces no results” because it can not unless the directory “run/dump1090-fa” exists.
There were two problems - without that directory, the web page won’t work.
The gain was a more subtle issue - as you said. Perhaps the Nano 2 works differently or by setting the gain so high (default) I just get a LOT of information - much of it without lat/lon.
I did not use the PiAware image. I was more interested in building a system that I could understand and control. For that reason I installed Raspian separately. I’m sure the image install would work much better for obvious reasons.
Thanks for you help on this - The purpose of my post was only to assist other usrers who may experience the same set of issues I did.
If you want to try out the sdcard image on a spare sdcard that would at least let us rule out (most) package configuration errors as a cause.
I still don’t know what’s up with the missing /run directory - maybe you have something odd in your systemd setup, or are not using systemd at all? As I said, it should be created automatically by systemd when the service starts (see the dump1090-fa service file, RuntimeDirectory setting)
