Newbie here, couple of questions

FlightAware General
1

Hi all! I’ve just started to send data to FA two days ago. I don’t have much experience, only played a little bit with ADS-B some time ago.

A couple of questions first:

  1. I’d like to have something like this: instagram.com/p/BTaGsZXF-KL/
    I know that’s RRD, but can I do that with PiAware or do I need to switch to an alternative dump1090 app? any link or howto with more information?
    I want those graphs! :slight_smile:

  2. Can I feed other sites (ie: fr24) using the PA ‘distro’ or do I have to use raspbian for that?

  3. I have this old ‘spider’ antenna: ibb.co/co0yCF
    Does the corrosion affects its performance? can I still use it or do you suggest me to build a new one? in that case what can I do to protect that type of antenna from the weather?

Some info about my setup:
The first 24hs I used the stock whip antenna that came with my Noeelec receiver. Yesterday (24hs later) switched to a homebrew CoCo antenna made by me during the afernoon. I’m seeing an improvement but not as much as I was expecting (stats: flightaware.com/adsb/stats/user/limaunion). The improvement begins at 6pm when I made the switch. I plan tomorrow to relocate the antenna to a better place and also to build a cantenna for comparison.

During next week I’ll upgrade the receiver to the FA Pro+ and a RPI 2. I live in a crowded city and hope to have improvements with the FA Pro+ rx.

For anyone interested currently I’m running the latest PiAware release (3.5.1) in an ancient Raspberry Pi 1 model B+ (512Mb RAM), with these stats:
$ uptime
21:48:36 up 1 day, 21:00, 2 users, load average: 0.66, 0.61, 0.62

$ vmstat 2 5
procs -----------memory---------- —swap-- -----io---- -system-- ------cpu-----
r b swpd free buff cache si so bi bo in cs us sy id wa st
2 0 0 350328 16212 80256 0 0 1 0 84 29 34 9 57 0 0
0 0 0 350264 16212 80256 0 0 0 0 414 706 32 6 62 0 0
1 0 0 350184 16212 80256 0 0 0 0 433 718 31 8 61 0 0
0 0 0 350344 16212 80256 0 0 0 0 419 693 30 9 61 0 0
0 0 0 350264 16212 80256 0 0 0 0 422 705 31 7 62 0 0

$ free -m
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 481 139 342 4 15 78
-/+ buffers/cache: 45 436
Swap: 0 0 0

Thanks for your comments

1 Like
2

Newbie here too. (Please don’t bite hard! :laughing: )

  1. I have this old ‘spider’ antenna: ibb.co/co0yCF
    Does the corrosion affects its performance? can I still use it or do you suggest me to build a new one? in that case what can I do to protect that type of antenna from the weather?

Yes, corrosion can be detrimental to the performance of an antenna. Replace all corroded parts wherever possible. You can use self-amalgamating tape and/or silicone sealant to help protect against corrosion. Stainless steel fittings will also give some protection - marine grade is a good choice as it is designed to withstand sea spray.

I have a question too - is there a method of listing all aircraft “spotted” by my FlightFeeder? (I know nothing of programming languages used by Raspberry Pi.)

Cheers!

3

Thanks for your comments about corrosion, I need a new spider antenna…

Regarding your question, it seems all the spotted aircrafts are saved to different files under /var/run/dump1090-fa in JSON format. You can manipulate that info with grep and friends (AWK, Excel, etc) or maybe there’s some script from someone for that (hope someone else can enlighten us)

Greetings!

4

Cheers for that. Good luck with the antenna!