Hello team! I’ve been running a new PiAware on a Raspberry Pi 2 for about a month now, and I’m not seeing any MLATs showing up on the local display. It seems like MLAT is working; I get a small number of MLAT positions/planes reported daily, the connection status in piaware.out looks good, and I’m sync’d with between 4-8 local receivers. But I’ve never once seen a blue plane on the display. Any ideas?
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http://postimg.org/image/pmd56ew31/
Julius,
I looked on the coverage map (flightaware.com/adsb/coverage) and there aren’t many receivers near you.
This one is a little to the south east (and a few in the area)
flightaware.com/adsb/stats/user/delmonaco03
You seem to have better range to the north west. I think 4 is the minimum required and they need to be spaced out correctly to be useful. It may be that the pattern just doesn’t work well for you.
If you can get a little more antenna height you should get a lot of hits from trans-Altantic flights.
(Doesn’t really help MLAT A/C though).
You may see more when the weather fines up.
You may have better luck the mutability version of dump1090 if you have some unix/linux skills.
It seems to get 10-30% better range and A/C.
The later model TXCO dongles seem to have a better receiver in them.
Long antenna cable runs can attenuate the signal a lot. Better cable helps.
Jon
Thanks Jon. Yes, the coverage is poor towards the southwest due to terrain. I’ve got a hill on that side but good line of site to the NW, and I’m very happy with the coverage in that dir. I just assumed that if a plane was reported as an MLAT in my stats, it would show up blue at some point on the display. But of course I don’t have eyes on it 24/7, so maybe I’m just not seeing it.
You will need dump1090-mutability to show mlat aircraft. Previous versions of dump1090 won’t distinguish between them and ADS-B aircraft - it will forward mlat results on to any other feeders you are running which is probably not a good idea.
Fixed it! You do not need dump1090-mutability; the FA versions of dump1090 also produce MLAT display on the map (I’m using ver 1.2-3.) The problem was that I had run a script from ADSBExchange.com to add a feed for them, which modified the piaware-config to only send results to ADSBExchange. So my config previously looked like this:
-mlatResultsFormat “beast,connect,feed.adsbexchange.com:30005”
I had to change it to this:
-mlatResultsFormat “beast,connect,localhost:30104 beast,connect,feed.adsbexchange.com:30005”
and now I’m getting blue MLAT aircraft, as PiAware feeds MLAT back to dump1090 on port 30104. Great!