Newbie here, couple of questions

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

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!

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!

Cheers for that. Good luck with the antenna!