Hello community,
(I started ADS-B feeding last year with a self build setup with a Raspberry. Because I wanted to use the Raspberry for other projects, I applied to FlightAware for a flight feeder and happily got it last week. The blue one with the white Antenna with built in GPS)
I temporarily hung it in front of the window for a week to test it - everything, including GPS and MLAT, worked.
Today I installed it in the final position. At the old chimney on the roof, about 12 meters above ground and around 4 meters away from the test position.
The reception is great. I even get several planes from more than 400km away (Site 183377).
The flight feeder has been running for several hours now but still has no GPS reception and of course MLAT doesn’t work either.
I have no idea what it could be. I restarted the feeder after more than 3 hours of uptime, nothing helped. Loosening the cable screw connection to the antenna and feeder again and tightening it again doesn’t help either. The reception of the ADS-B signals is also very good.
I, and probably FlightAware too, would not like to feed without MLAT. There is a small airfield 2.5km away from which I receive a lot of traffic via MLAT.
It looks like your receiver is out of sync with the GPS clock. That would indicate to me that either your connection to your local network has a lot of latency and so it can’t correct the clock time, or that there is something wrong with the GPS receiver onboard the feeder.
I’d start with checking your network connection, since it was working correctly before. Are you on WiFi? Are you too far from the WiFi access point? 4 meters farther away from the AP could make a big difference. If you’re on ethernet, is your cable connection good and are you within 100m of your network port? Can you test the latency by pinging the device from your computer? Does that show dropped packets and long latency?
I tend to agree with you. I’m guessing that MLAT would show up if you connected the Flight Feeder to your network via ethernet. I’ve never actually seen a flight feeder, and I can’t find a picture of it online (more than what the front looks like), but I’m thinking that there’s something with the wifi connection (latency) which is making the MLAT signals too late to be useful.
Do you have a long ethernet cable you could temporarily attach to both the Flight feeder and your router to see if the problem goes away? can you move the wifi/router closer to the flight feeder?
When you hover over MLAT on the screen you showed above, what type of error message does it give you?
Also, you have GPS reception - it’s just that it’s too far off time-wise to be useful.
There’s an intermittent hardware/firmware problem that can cause the GPS synchronization to break; often a reboot / power cycle fixes it. Usually it develops over the course of a few months though.
I’ll do a remote reboot of the FlightFeeder and see if that helps.
Good morning from the French-German boarder,
the feeder is connected via ethernet. My internet is a 1 Gbit fibre connection with a ping around 8ms. So that shouldn’t be the problem.
But I just checked the feeder again and now MLAT is working. So the reboot from obj helped…
… Hope it stays that way now.
Yes, I’m happy with the Flightfeeder now. Performs better than my low-budget Pi solution (what surprise )
With the Pi 4 I had an 9 € Antenna from Aliexpress → 10cm Pigtail → Filter/Booster (15 € Aliexpress) → 4 meter USB-Cable → already owned SDR-Stick (elegoo).
Screenshots taken at the same time, same antenna location.
At the moment the Pi is still running, feeding FR24 and ADS-B exchange. Have to figure out/setup a solution that the Raspberry is using the data from the Flightfeeder to feed the other services.
I’m missing tar1090 on the Flightfeeder as well…have to figure that out as well, how to run it on the Raspberry, using the data from the Flightfeeder.
Out of interest is there anything in the FlightFeeder that would indeed make it outperform a PiAware with a blue Pro Stick Plus? Assume everything else from the SMA connector upwards is the same.
Flightfeeder uses Flightaware supplied quality Antenna and quality coax.
If I understood @GeoBoris’s post correctly, his Pi4 is using antenna, coax, and filter of unknown quality from Aliexpress, and this makes a big difference in performance.
Also, flightfeeder is free, and no muss/no fuss. You do need to adhere to strict rules in terms of placement, internet connection, uptime, etc. etc. to keep it since it is FA’s hardware they are loaning you. In return you get the satisfaction of adding to their flight network and free FA access.
I guess if it’s dedicated circuitry it will always surpass the more generic SDR chipset. Or at least equal it in performance, all else being equal upwards from the unit.
)
