Maximizing Plane and Position Counts: Where should I concentrate my efforts

FlightAware ADS-B Flight Tracking
7

Just an update on some tweaks I have made that have helped squeeze out a bit more performance…

  1. Remounted my antenna and it is now roughly 2-1/2ft higher.

  2. The remount of the antenna required a longer cable run, so I switched from 25ft KMR240 to 35ft KMR400. The KMR400 is definitely harder to work with, but despite the extra 10ft of KMR400, I was able to reduce my attenuation by about 0.5dB (per the supplied specs – I didn’t actually measure myself).

  3. I swapped out the light blue flight aware filter for a 1090 MHz cavity filter and a 978 MHz cavity filter.

  4. I changed the order of inline hardware, swapped out the FlightAware SDRs for Nooelec Smartee v2’s and added Nooelec LaNA’s. The signal path now looks like this:
    Antenna > KMR400 (35ft) > ZAPD-21 Splitter > Cavity filter > LNA > SDR

These changes yielded a slight uptick in plane counts, but a big increase in positions reported. Early results show I now get over 1.2 million positions with my best day so far being 1.34 million positions. I think the biggest help has been the cavity filters. My RF environment is much cleaner. Now, if I could just move those mountains out of the way…

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