New user, Piaware, FlightAware and Fr24?

FlightAware ADS-B Flight Tracking
1

Hello everyone.

I’ve been considering setting up something to monitor air traffic for some time and have just bought various bits and pieces to do this.

I’ve got a Raspberry Pi3 with the current Piaware download. This is working fine, I have barely any traffic showing so far but I’m effectively using a bit of wire as an aerial until the one I’ve ordered arrives. It’s not quite a bit of wire (a tri band 6m/2m/70cms collinear at 10m AGL) but to all intents and purposes, it may as well be because it’s so unresonant. However, it’s showing me that the system is running and once I sort out a decent aerial, preamp and filter, all will improve.

Anyway.

I also want to upload to Fr24 so I’ve followed the simple instructions. set up my location, etc and it sort of seems to work. The stats page shows I’ve uploaded something but not very much at all and there’s no mac address listed and the upload rate is sitting at 0.00. It does say I’m online, there’s just nothing really happening. See here

FlightAware is showing much more - See here.

If I issue a sudo service fr24feed status command on my pi, this is what I get:



pi@piaware:~$ sudo service fr24feed status
● fr24feed.service - LSB: Flightradar24 Decoder & Feeder
   Loaded: loaded (/etc/init.d/fr24feed)
   Active: active (running) since Fri 2016-11-04 22:39:51 UTC; 9min ago
  Process: 373 ExecStart=/etc/init.d/fr24feed start (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
   CGroup: /system.slice/fr24feed.service
           └─409 /usr/bin/fr24feed -- --monitor-file=/dev/shm/fr24feed.txt --write-pid=/var/run/fr24feed.pid --quiet --log...

Nov 04 22:39:50 piaware systemd[1]: Starting LSB: Flightradar24 Decoder & Feeder...
Nov 04 22:39:50 piaware fr24feed[373]: Starting FR24 feeder: fr24feed.
Nov 04 22:39:51 piaware systemd[1]: Started LSB: Flightradar24 Decoder & Feeder.

Which doesn’t look right to me.

Can anyone offer some advice please as to what’s not quite right. I suspect things are nearly right!

Thanks,
Keith.

2

I’m going to answer myself here.

I suspect that a better way to do things is to blat what I’ve already got and start again but rather than use the PiAware image, go with a clean Raspbian install and then install the packages I want to feed to where I want rather than try and bolt one sites feeder onto another sites base image.

Is this the preferred option?

Starting with dump1090-mutability?

Keith.

3

The ADS-B receiver project thread, ADS-B Receiver Project, will do everything you want to do very easily. You can choose the version with Dump1090-Mutability, then install feeders, or use the FA version of dump1090. It is painless, takes about 15 minutes and you are good to go.

Good Luck.

4

Oh that’s more useful, thank you very much.

5

dump1090-fa is the best choice instead of dump1090 or mutability

Sent from my SM-N910F using Tapatalk

6

I have installed FR24 feeder + Piaware data feeder (add-on) with dump1090-fa on one microSD card, and with dump1090-mutability on another microSD card. Both work ok.

I like the user interface (Map) of dump1090-fa better than that of dump1090-mutability, but feel that configuration of mutability version is more user friendly than fa version. Another reason I prefer mutability version is that it is non site-specific.

To summarize. both version work ok, and it is the personal preferences which decide which version to install.

See also Flightradar24 forum thread for automated installation:
Automated Installation of Dump1090-Mutability, Data Feeders, and Performance Graphs

7

Thanks everyone, that’s exactly the method I used, the ADS-B Receiver Project on a fresh install to set up mutability, FlightAware and Fr24. I also knocked up a quarter wave groundplane ‘spider’ aerial and hung it on the curtain rail just while I’m waiting for a better aerial to arrive that I can nail up outside.

It’s not fantastic but you can see which way the window is facing! Really keen to get the outside aerial up as soon as I can.