MLAT - Fa-mlat-client not running

FlightAware ADS-B Flight Tracking
1

Fresh piaware on SD card. Feeder Type: PiAware (SD Card) 2.1-5
Multilateration (MLAT): Supported / Enabled

Everything else is running great but the fa-mlat-client and I have no MLAT data.

greping processes shows fa-mlat-client is not running at all.

Looking at /tmp/piaware.out I see no mlat(####) messages at all and also no errors. Just the basic services have started up fine and I am sending msgs to FlightAware.

Autoupdate 1
mlat 1
mlatResults 1
mlatResultsFormat default

I read through a number of the other MLAT discussions and started looking through the mlat.tcl code to see if I can find why its not starting but i’m drawing nothing. I’m sure I am overlooking something very simple. I also looked and see many other piawares around me that have MLAT active.

Any thoughts? thanks much

2

Have you set your antenna location?
It could be that there are no other mlat devices in the area.

Have you run sudo apt-get update /upgrade / dis-upgrade to get the latest code.

3

You need to manually set your receiver location here: flightaware.com/adsb/stats/user/mwyatt001
then restart piaware (or wait up to 6 hours)

1 Like
4

Definitely ran updates on everything first to rule that out.

I also set my location and elevation a few days ago. Did I do that wrong somehow? Seemed pretty straight forward, I have my Lat, long, and elevation above sea all manually entered through the advanced settings.

According to my site, there are quite a few MLAT (18) sites within 8 miles of me.

5

Your site is not showing a manually set location at the moment which is why mlat is not working. Maybe you forgot to confirm the location at the end of the process?

6

Knew it was something simple. I had read that troubleshooting tip during my initial research.

I am not sure why it didn’t take my manual update. Did it again and it seemed to take, as it changed from Piaware estimate to user entered. Maybe too many decimal places?

Logs show it fired up after reboot. Now just to wait for a bit.

Thanks much.

7

Not sure if I’m having the same problem, but I’m seeing the same thing. I have the same configuration:


$ sudo cat /root/.piaware
manualUpdate 1
mlat 1
mlatResults 1
mlatResultsFormat default
password XXXX
user mikeage

but I don’t see any mlat processes running:


mikeage@XXXX ~$ ps fauwx
root     24404  0.0  0.1  22400  8076 ?        Sl   22:03   0:00 /usr/bin/piaware -p /var/run/piaware.pid
root     24445  0.0  0.0   2852  1952 ?        S    22:03   0:00  \_ /usr/lib/piaware/helpers/faup1090 --net-bo-ipaddr localhost --net-bo-port 30005 --stdout --lat 31.710 --lon 34.999

Note that I’m running my own instance of dump1090, but it’s the latest mutability release (specifically, this commit github.com/mutability/dump1090/ … ee6aa74bef) . In my case, dump1090 isn’t running on this machine (a linux VPS) but on an OpenWrt device in my house; I have tunnels set up on 30001, 30002, 30003, 30004, and 30005 between the VPS and the OpenWrt device.

On startup, /tmp/piaware.out looks like this:


01/25/2016 20:03:25 ****************************************************
01/25/2016 20:03:25 piaware version 2.1-5 is running, process ID 24404
01/25/2016 20:03:25 your system info is: Linux linode 4.1.5-x86_64-linode61 #7 SMP Mon Aug 24 13:46:31 EDT 2015 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
01/25/2016 20:03:25 Connecting to FlightAware adept server at piaware.flightaware.com/1200
01/25/2016 20:03:25 ADS-B data program 'sshd:' is listening on port 30005, so far so good
01/25/2016 20:03:25 Starting faup1090: /usr/lib/piaware/helpers/faup1090 --net-bo-ipaddr localhost --net-bo-port 30005 --stdout --lat 31.710 --lon 34.999
01/25/2016 20:03:25 Started faup1090 (pid 24445) to connect to sshd:
01/25/2016 20:03:25 Connection with adept server at piaware.flightaware.com/1200 established
01/25/2016 20:03:25 FlightAware server SSL certificate validated
01/25/2016 20:03:25 encrypted session established with FlightAware
01/25/2016 20:03:25 autoUpdate is not configured in /etc/piaware or by piaware-config
01/25/2016 20:03:25 manualUpdate in adept config is enabled, allowing update
01/25/2016 20:03:25 multilateration support enabled (use piaware-config to disable)
01/25/2016 20:03:26 logged in to FlightAware as user mikeage
01/25/2016 20:03:55 0 msgs recv'd from sshd:; 0 msgs sent to FlightAware
01/25/2016 20:08:55 0 msgs recv'd from sshd: (0 in last 5m); 0 msgs sent to FlightAware

Is this a legitimate scenario? Can I run piaware this way and expect to get mlat data? Or is the problem simply that there aren’t enough people in my area for MLAT to work?

8

You should be fine tunnelling like that (though from those logs, it looks like there’s no data flowing at the moment), piaware doesn’t really care how the data gets to port 30005.

The lack of mlat is indeed because there aren’t enough nearby feeders at the moment.

9

Thanks. I know I picked a bad time, but I wanted to show the logs right after a restart.

Got it. Do you know roughly how many sites within how large an area are required for MLAT?

10

Here is the coverage map
flightaware.com/adsb/coverage zoom in to your region.
You can see there are are only about 10 receivers in the entire country.

11

Minimum 4 piaware receivers that can see the same aircraft. Last time I checked that area, part of the problem was that some of the sites had poor range. That area is also near the overlap of several server regions and the north Africa side actually has so few receivers that there’s not even a server running there. I’ll look at whether the server balancing needs to be rerun around there.

12

Thanks obj! Right now my range is pretty poor, but I can see that there are a few sites nearby with some excellent range. I’ve been approved for a flightfeeder; hopefully when that arrives (and more importantly, its proper antenna!), I should be getting much better range. I’m not LOS to LLBG, but I am LOS to above 300 feet AGL at LLBG :slight_smile: