I put together a Python app that can run side by side with dump1090 on a RPi or on a remote machine and produces a set of live charts that show message rate averages over various periods, signal strengths percentile ranges, aircraft distance percentile ranges, and counts of signals in distance buckets.
The charts update continuously once per second, so you can change your antenna position or modify the dump1090 settings and restart the server and see the effects instantly. For the gain settings for dump1090-fa, it’s quite instructive to set the gain value to zero and observe how the algorithm tunes the gain over the course of a couple of minutes.
I don’t have the time this week to package this up nicely, but if you’re a little Python literate, you can grab the files and throw them into a directory, you should be able to get it running with “pip install -r requirements.txt” and then “python msgrates.py”. The web page is served up on port 8000.
