Due to cranky neighbors and many trees I use multiple devices and antennas to see a majority of the sky.
Is there an easy/automated way to see overlap of my received data to maximize my setup? If two of my three units are already receiving all the data of my third I would like to redeploy it elsewhere.
Thanks for any suggestions you might have.
Virtual Radar can consolidate the view of multiple piawares(I have it doing two at the moment).
If you want to run virtual radar see here (this will get you what you want on Windows 7-10)
ads-b-flight-tracking-f21/ads-b-feeder-project-setup-scripts-t36532.html
It is also possible to make one piaware a master and have the others feed it. Not sure how well this handles MLAT.
+1 for VRS. I have it running on a cheap netbook with great results. I haven’t (yet) consolidated two receivers into one display, but I am merging the ADS-B and MLAT feeds into one display, and that works pretty flawlessly.
VRS also gives you a range plot, which is quite cool - and will help you see how well each of your setups is performing. When you merge feeds, each has an individual range plot - so if for nothing else, I think you’ll find that feature very helpful.
You can run another instance of dump1090 in network only mode, and feed the output of each receiver to it.
There is also modesmixer2, which can accept multiple receiver inputs. It also has a nice built in range histogram, polar plot and message rate graph, and overlays your range onto the map. If you want, it can log to a database and display silhouettes and pictures. There are various output formats available. The nice thing about it is that you don’t need any other external software to connect to the receivers, it can make the connection itself whereas dump1090 needs netcat or similar to feed it the data feed.
Both of those are quite a lot lighter than running VRS and work well on linux if you want it on a raspberry pi. VRS does most of the above but is written for windows and although it does work on linux with mono, it’s not as easy to set up as it is on windows.
Thanks for the feedback on VRS. I have run that previously. Maybe that is my best bet, I was looking for something less visual and more data driven. I guess worst case I can log and DIFF the outputs? Mainly want to see vectors where I am overlapping.
I will report back if I find something more granular than looking at VRS, but will fire that back up, it is already installed in a Win7 VM.