Hello everyone! For a while, I wanted to get started with flight tracking, but I got demotivated by my lack of knowledge in the radio field, and the limited hardware available here in Hungary. When starting and seeing threads like this, I doubt any setup that I choose fearing it would be just a waste of money.
I am not so worried about the software side, as I’m pretty confident with my skills. My goal is to have this feeder contribute to flightaware, adsbexchange and flightradar24, or potentially more services in the future.
I would love to contribute something opensource to the community.
The hardware would be a spare Raspberry Pi 3. From what I saw on Opencellid there are two UMTS and an LTE tower nearby, but nothing obvious apart from these.
Mounting options are above, I would put power and ethernet down the chimney.
Can you guys give me recommendations which antenna / filter / USB stick or just hardware setup to use? As I mentioned some things aren’t available here, and I’m not willing to pay extra 60-100 bucks for shipping and VAT.
Also if you aren’t satisfied with current software setups I would love to help.
I’m hoping this is obvious, but I assume you’re either running the cables down the side of the chimney, or you’re not using the fireplace it’s attached to. Either way, that metal plate on top may be a good attachment point for the simple wire antenna. A metal base tends to help those (someone else can explain why – I don’t actually understand it, I just know it works). If you’re wanting something bigger/more powerful, you’re going to need some separation from it, though.
How much modification to the location can you do? Do you own the property, or if not, are you allowed drill into the chimney to mount an antenna mast? In most cases, the higher your antenna, the better your reception should be.
I’d at least consider the 1090Mhz band-pass filter if you know you have nearby RF sources. It may not be necessary, but they’re not expensive.
Good luck! Let us know how it turns out, and post your setup when you’re done!
I have seen similar setups done, but I assumed these were mostly for ones where you only have a window available for example, and weather proofing is another thing of course.
Of course I don’t use the chimney, it’s even sealed off indoors. I have full access to the property, but this is the highest point available There is a 15m tree nearby which would give full access to the horizon, but I doubt this would be feasible without a solid support.
Also do you have any antenna / filter / dongle recommendations?
As far as band-pass filters, just don’t go cheap. They’re not so expensive that you need to save money on them. The FlightAware filter works fine.
Antennas and dongles are the purview of others here.
As for site access, I was thinking you could extend a pole off the chimney to give yourself more height. Check https://www.heywhatsthat.com/ (I don’t know how accurate their data is where you are) to see what giving yourself another 2.5 to 3m above the chimney might do. In my case, adding about 2 meters to my antenna height gets me a lot more horizon to the East and South, but doesn’t help me at all for the Northeast (I’d need 18 meters to clear the ridge in that direction).
If you want to have a decent set then I’d reccomend
FA Prostick Plus (blue one)
FA Barrel filter
Decent cable (LMR-400 would be great)
An antenna from Slovakia https://www.vinnant.sk
Both the COL1090/9-PSE and the COL1090/8-P are great antennas that outperform the FA antenna ( and for the same or less price)
An Airspy mini could also be a dongle you could choose but you will need an LNA with that to enhance the signals to an acceptable level.
I fully agree with @feederflightaware for a new hobbyist to start with a low-cost basic setup, and builtup bit by bit.
The blue DVB-T dongle with small whip antenna linked by @feederflightaware is an ideal low-cost choice for a start. Just place the magnetic base antenna (supplied with Blue DVB-T) over a metallic food can made of irron/steel, and place it indoors near an outer wall or window. The iron food can will serve two purposes.
(1) The magnetic base of antenna will cling to the can and stay upright. Without this, the antenna will keep on falling.
(2) The metallic food can will act as ground-plane for the antenna, and will substantially improve it’s performance.
As a next step, you can build yourself at almost no cost a DIY Quick Spider from a 1 meter piece of ordinary coax like the one used for TV antenna or Satellite dish antenna.
Right on, appreciate the offer to help on the software side! I think you’ll find as you get into it that there’s a hole in the statistical analysis side. You’ll see a lot of “This new antenna works so much better, look at my graph”, but lacking robust actual programmatic comparisons.
The whole project is super fun, and it’s probably hard to go wrong when you’re getting started. Enjoy the journey!
@scooper9 You can even start with the Pi, the blue Pro Stick Plus, and a cheap mini indoor antenna (and a tin of chocolates of course!). That will be enough to get your station up and running and see what is around you. You can play with the software and the maps. You can practice feeding all the places you mentioned. If it breaks, no problem, within 20 minutes you can have a fresh image and start over. It will quickly become very easy.
The point is this is a very low cost way to be up and running this week without getting lost in the endless options that are talked about in here.
Then find the best antenna (some suggestions further up) and your coax and mounting options, filters, preamps and so on, and that is your next stage. That will be much easier and you will feel much more confident and settled when you have already used the software and know what to expect and how to tweak the settings and how to feed everywhere.
The picture below shows my very first setup 10 years ago when I started this hobby. I spent only $12 for dongle +whip antenna, and that’s all .
@chrislfa - at that time I have not yet discovered the hidden benfit of this hobby to eat biscuits and chocolate on pretext of using their tins as ground plane for the whip antenna , so their cost was not part of cost of this setup.
The dongle was plugged into Windows PC on which I have installed two free apps: (1) jetvision’s RTL1090 (2) adsbScope by Sprut.de
4 GB ram, 32 GB eMMC drive, + Power Supply Unit, for US $22 + Free Shipping.
You can get 5 of these in the same price as a Pi 4 plus its power supply.
I am sucessfully using this one for almost an year to feed Flightaware, FR24, Plane Finder, and Adsbexchange, after I replaced its Android 11 OS by Armbian Bookworm OS.
I recently put in some effort and found a site that sells pro sticks pluses relatively cheaply with shipping included, and I found rpishop.cz, I went ahead and ordered one with a whip antenna.
Currently, I’m considering buying an antenna from Vinnant, either a COL1090/5-SU or a CC1090/9-PSE. Does the higher gain antenna provide a much better distance or there isn’t much difference?
I have a nexus player that I could possibly repurpose to further my hobby. @abcd567 how did you go about flashing ambian on the android box? I could perhaps try the same steps with my nexus player.
Consider putting a USB extension cable between the ProStick and the RPi. There’s some RF noise that comes off the Pi that can sometimes interfere with decoding.
My live setup will be there in the original chimney photo I started the thread with. I would attach a pole to the chimney and on top of that the antenna. I could have the PI up there as well, but then I’d have worse accessibility and the risk of weather damaging it. The better option would be running some coax cable down the chimney (around 4m) and having an N type connector at the end of it. This way everything would be safe, but I don’t know much about signal loss along coax and all this stuff.
Of course I don’t use the chimney, it’s even sealed off indoors. I have full access to the property, but this is the highest point available There is a 15m tree nearby which would give full access to the horizon, but I doubt this would be feasible without a solid support. 
, so their cost was not part of cost of this setup.
