I’m curious why I’m seeing no MLATs when running piaware in a Ubuntu VM on VirtualBox (VB) on a decent Windows laptop, but when running it on Fusion on a nicely configured MacBook Pro I was getting lots of MLATs. The antenna position was even better for the PC setup than for the Mac. The dongle was the same. I believe the issue is the slower performance of the VM on the PC running VB compared to the Mac running Fusion. Those are the only variables. I had set my location in both cases, and I checked that mlat was running. What conditions must be met in order for mlats to work?
The “bad” VM is probably dropping some USB data; as I mentioned in the other thread, mlat is very sensitive to this.
(essentially, multilateration with these dongles works by counting samples between seeing a reference ADS-B message, and seeing a message from the aircraft to be multilaterated. If the USB subsystem is dropping sample data, then that timing is not reliable)
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Yes, I remember you said that. The first time I had asked, it turned out the problem I had was that I hadn’t set my location properly. Once I fixed that, I was seeing many MLATs (on the Mac). But now I do believe you’re right that the reason I’m not getting any on the PC is that it’s dropping some USB data, most likely.
Hello. I feed to fa under win10 x64. I use debian, support under hiper-V.
my config dump1090 v.1.15:
dump1090.exe --device-index 1 --gain 49 --net --interactive --net-bo-port 30005 --modeac --max-range 500 --fix --phase-enhance --aggressive --metric
pause
My config piaware:
feeder-id c5ec0bfa-****-47dd-8d84-9c99380601c4 # updated by fa_piaware_config
allow-auto-updates yes # updated by fa_piaware_config
allow-manual-updates yes # updated by fa_piaware_config
allow-mlat yes # updated by fa_piaware_config
mlat-results yes # updated by fa_piaware_config
mlat-results-format beast,listen,30105 ext_basestation,listen,30106 # updated by fa_piaware_config
I have two receiver to VRS: 1-st port 30005, 2-nd port 30106
and one Merged Feed (1+2 receiver to one)/
I see my feed to https://flightaware.com/adsb/stats/user/rikifromgomel
BUT MLAT RED!!! and don’t work.
service ntp install. service synchronize time on win10 off.
MY log on flightaware.com:
no ADS-B data program is serving on port 30005, not starting multilateration client yet
[2020-05-16 22:05 +03] no ADS-B data program seen listening on port 30005 for 371 seconds, trying to start it…
[2020-05-16 22:05 +03] can’t start beast-splitter, no services that look like beast-splitter found
[2020-05-16 22:05 +03] attempting to start beast-splitter…
[2020-05-16 22:05 +03] no ADS-B data program seen listening on port 30005 for 10 seconds, next check in 60s
[2020-05-16 22:05 +03] no ADS-B data program is serving on port 30005, not starting multilateration client yet
[2020-05-16 22:05 +03] failed to run netstat: \nchild process 5863 exited with status 1
[2020-05-16 22:06 +03] no ADS-B data program is serving on port 30005, not starting multilateration client yet
[2020-05-16 22:06 +03] 20 msgs recv’d from the Mode-S Beast serial port (9 in last 5m); 20 msgs sent to FlightAware
[2020-05-16 22:06 +03] my feeder ID is c5ec0bfa-****-47dd-8d84-9c99380601c4
[2020-05-16 22:06 +03] multilateration data requested
[2020-05-16 22:06 +03] Failed to update feeder ID file at /var/cache/piaware/feeder_id: couldn’t open “/var/cache/piaware/feeder_id.new”: permission denied
[2020-05-16 22:06 +03] logged in to FlightAware as user rikifromgomel
[2020-05-16 22:06 +03] failed to run netstat: \nchild process 5881 exited with status 1
[2020-05-16 22:06 +03] adept reported location: 52.35954, 31.02601, 433ft AMSL
[2020-05-16 22:06 +03] site statistics URL: https://flightaware.com/adsb/stats/user/rikifromgomel#stats-108864
[2020-05-16 22:06 +03] no ADS-B data program is serving on port 30005, not starting multilateration client yet
Help me please!!!
Kirill from belarus. UMGG
Hi Kirill from Belarus,
See Required packages for running piaware, and more about mlats - #170 by curtko.
Use VMware Player (free for non-commercial use). Don’t use Hyper-V. Make your Linux VM as small and lightweight as possible. What was interesting about this experiment was that it showed you can run piaware on a wimpy CPU on an old Windows laptop in a Linux virtual machine, and that such a seemingly slow platform has enough horsepower and low enough latency to support a real-time application like piaware – in particular, the mlat calculations. Someone made the comment that piaware should only be run directly on a RPi. Of course, an RPi uses less power and is much cheaper than a laptop. But if you have an old laptop that you want to repurpose to run piaware, it is certainly possible. As others have pointed out, if you want to run Linux directly on an old Windows laptop (no VMs), that would work well too.
This was a fun and interesting learning experience. Many thanks to @abcd567 for his help on this.
Best regards, Curt
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You are -not- using dump1090 ver 1.15 on Debian. You are using dump1090.exe on Windows. This version is from dump1090 Malcolm Robb fork.
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You have communication problem between the dump1090 on Windows, and piaware on Debian in Wndows under hiper-V.
Do this:
sudo piaware-config receiver-type relay
sudo piaware-config receiver-host 192.168.0.10
## Replace 192.168.0.10 by local IP of your Windows computer
sudo piaware-config receiver-port 30005
sudo systemctl restart piaware
Here is the result I get by running dump1090.exe on my Windows machine and making above configuration changes to piaware config on my RPi
:
May 17 15:18:29 piaware piaware[559]: mlat-client(751): Listening for Beast-format results connection on port 30105
May 17 15:18:29 piaware piaware[559]: mlat-client(751): Listening for Extended Basestation-format results connection on port 30106
May 17 15:18:29 piaware piaware[559]: mlat-client(751): Route MTU changed to 1500
May 17 15:18:29 piaware piaware[559]: mlat-client(751): Input connected to localhost:30005
May 17 15:18:29 piaware piaware[559]: mlat-client(751): Detected BEAST format input
May 17 15:18:29 piaware piaware[559]: mlat-client(751): Input format changed to BEAST, 12MHz clock
May 17 15:18:29 piaware piaware[559]: mlat-client(751): Beast-format results connection with ::1:30104: connection established
May 17 15:18:31 piaware piaware[559]: piaware has successfully sent several msgs to FlightAware!
May 17 15:18:43 piaware piaware[559]: mlat-client(751): Accepted Beast-format results connection from ::ffff:127.0.0.1:40744
May 17 15:18:58 piaware piaware[559]: 10 msgs recv'd from beast-splitter; 10 msgs sent to FlightAware