I’m new to pi-aware - just got my feeder station set up earlier today. I’ve searched in FAQs and around flightaware.com and haven’t found what’s probably a simple answer for this one:
When an airplane flies over, in line-of-sight of my antenna, I want to see if my system has heard that aircraft. How can I verify my receiver actually heard the aircraft?
I’ve had aircraft fly within line-of-sight range, but haven’t seen anything about it in the log (Statistics web page).
Thanks
Go to your flightaware portal page
flightaware.com/adsb/stats/user/n7tx
Enable MLAT and enter your locations LAT, Long and Alt.
This is so your feeder can triangulate with other feeders in the area.
In site information you can click on your own receiver (RHS)
Web interface: view live data (requires local network connection)
You must be on the same network as the receiver to view this webpage.
Not all aircraft are displayed. Only Mode S and ES are normally shown.
Older Mode 3A/C do not show up using the STD setup.
Thank you. I’ve done as you recommended, and I see the map on the “view live data” page. I’ve been watching that page, and when I hear an aircraft fly over my home, I see it on the map. However, how would I know for sure that my pi-aware receiver actually received a signal from that aircraft? (i’m assuming that i’m seeing those aircraft because other stations are hearing those aircraft and reporting them at the same time)
Steve,
The live page data only shows what your receiver is “seeing”.
In a while you should see your receiver syncing with other devices.
Something like
Multilateration (MLAT): Supported / Enabled (synchronized with xx nearby receivers)
There are many receivers in the Phoenix area so you should see quite a few.
I wonder if you need a restart to get MLAT to start working.
You can see consolidated “Approved” aircraft by using this URL
flightaware.com/live/
Note that there are opt out abilities for agencies and private aircraft owners and that all aircraft may not be displayed.
There are dev versions of the live map that allow you to click on links to quickly lookup the aircraft.
Jon
VK2TCW/K2TCW
Ok, I may have misunderstood - I thought the live data page showed aircraft that I was getting from 1090 dump (not necessarily aircraft that my receiver is seeing), since I see many aircraft that I am sure my receiver isn’t receiving. This isn’t clear to me yet, though.
I do have MLAT turned on - perhaps I need to give it a few more hours to catch up?
Alright, I found what’s probably not a conventional way of seeing that my receiver is working, but it worked for me … I dug into the flight track log of an aircraft that passed close by, and found two of the log rows that came from my receiver. So, at least I know my receiver is receiving and reporting back to FlightAware.
It would be nice if the View Live Data page/map turned the aircraft icon a different color once your own station had reported it - or something like that 
Thanks, Jon, for giving me some pointers.
All planes on the dump1090 “live view” webpage are seen by your receiver. The amount of information you have depends on the type of transponder on the plane.
Also, all planes seen by the receiver are sent to FlightAware and the stats are recorded on the ADSB stats page (assuming the receiver has a live connection to FlightAware).
If the plane has an ADSB transponder the position is sent in the transponder message. So it will be plotted on the map and on the side list it will appear as green shade.
If the plane doesn’t have a ADSB transponder (usually they will have the old mode-S transponder) then the plane will either be in white or purple in the list.
White means that the system can’t get an MLAT position and is not plotted on the map. You know that the plane is flying above but there is no way to know where.
Purple means that FlightAware got an MLAT position fix from data from multiple receivers and the calculated position is sent back to your receiver. This is an estimated position.
Some useful things to know about the live map:
You can click on a plane and the corresponding row will highlight
or
you can click on a row and the plane will highlight.
If you click on the plane it’s position will say in the top right if it is a Lat Long position (a real ADSB position message)
or it will say MLAT lat long position (estimated position)
Real ADSB messages are good to 30 feet and are very accurate.
Estimated ADSB message are good to about 1-2 km.
The receiver is decoding in real time. So the delay on the live map is measured in milliseconds.
The planes are FlightAware live are processed so the delay is a few seconds to a minute.
Lots of good info, David, thank you.
If you want to look at historical data of aircraft that your receiver has seen, then you could have a look at jprochazka’s receiver installation script thread - that now supports saving data to a MySQL database. You could also use Virtual Radar Server, as that has a database writer plugin and built in report generator. Data is saved in the basestation.sqb format.