As some of you know from my first post here then I am a newcomer to this forum and to the art of flight tracking, for these reasons I got a few questions, but first a line on my setup.
I build my receiver following the guidelines from the flightaware web site using Raspberry pi+, ADS-B receiver dongle, 16GB MicroSD card, WiFi adapter), the antenna that came with the ADS-B dongle (I know this antenna is not the best, but I had to start somewhere) running latest version of piaware. The whole build is located on my south facing terrace with a close to 180 degree line of sight to the sides and up. I have free line of sight to one of the final approach flight paths to the nearby airport.
My Questions:
Is there a log I can check each day that shows the flights tracked during e.g. the nights and/or evenings?
How come I see no squawks when I use the build in “tracker” accessed by the IP address of the box and :8080? I assume airlines from AA, TAM and so on uses squawk codes. See attched screenshot or can this only be decoded when accessing flightaware’s web?
How come I mostly see only higher altitude flights, basically none on the final approach, I have many fights passing right over the antenna, but the more lower ones are not tracked - is this normal, or must I do something?
How come when looking at My ADS-B page then the map is always empty - as per attached screenshot is this correct or?
I don’t know of a log that tracks everything your receiver “sees”. Others have loaded their feed data into a (local) database, but that’s a rather large project to tackle. There’s also /tmp/piaware.out that is tracking the total count of what is being sent to FA.
I know on the flights I track in the US, I only see squawks on planes that are taking off or landing at nearby airports. I think ATC is looking to actively track them on radar using their squawk codes.
The antenna that comes with the dongle can work better if you place it in a small “ground plane” I had used the lid to a can of beans (about 2.75") before I built a colinear antenna. You might also see if you can set the gain of the receiver to auto (–gain -10) in the PROG_ARGS line of your /etc/init.d/fadump1090.sh, like so:
You might also want to try adding --phase-enhance to the args. It helps mine a bit.
It’s a really good idea to backup your /etc/init.d/fadump1090.sh before you edit it. You’ll need to use “sudo” in your edit command (I use: sudo vi /etc/init.d/fadump1090.sh)
That’s what my map looks like too. It only shows your location (or locations if you had more than one), not the flights you’re tracking.
It looks like you are only hearing the spontaneously-transmitted “squitter” messages (notably, the position one), not the interrogation-reply-based messages. The squawk code is usually carried in replies to an interrogation from a secondary radar; if there are no interrogations, you won’t see any replies.
Perhaps your local ATC only uses the older ModeA/C for interrogation? Try adding --modeac to the dump1090 command line to decode that, too.
Thanks for the hint on the “ground plane” in fact I am working on something like that.
I am also trying to get the antenna higher up as that will give me a line of sight to the north.
Problem with that is the distance to the top which is more than the lenght od the antenna cable and the USB cable I put between the raspberry and the dongle. Where I am these days not much supplies.
I will try to do the gain setting, but for the “enhance” I read somewhere that it was not recommended to do the “enhance” - right or wrong?
I believe that it’s the --aggressive option that is not recommended.
In “limited” testing I’ve found --phase-enhance to be somewhat helpful.
I built the G7RGQ collinear (for about $10 US) and increased my plane count from about 50/day to about 200/day. Took about a hour and mostly spare parts I had around.
