This arrived in the mail today and did a very quick comparison between this and the original DVB-T+DAB+FM dongle that uses the R820T.
Tried to do a side-by-side comparison with two antennas, both the same, and more or less at the same place but couldn’t quite get the results where one could easily distinguish between the two by frames/sec (partly because of the limited number of planes in the area I suppose right now).
Instead, looked at all of the planes being picked up by the original R820T and then did the same thing with the latest R820T2. Right away, something was shown when using the R820T2 while the older one didn’t. I would rarely pick up a plane up high above Ottawa with the original R820T but with the R820T2 it was able to pick up UAE’s A6-GGP/DUB8. The frames weren’t coming in every second but at least it’s picking up something.
I’ve been running a new one off and on over the last week. Thus far, not a lot of difference from the older one that is running on a pi 24/7. Of course, living essentially in a hole in the foothills doesn’t help much. Either old or new, basically dirt cheap. Antenna location seems to be a bigger factor- roof is better here.
Agreed… after using it a few days I would also have to conclude that the benefits of the newer one is probably small compared to the old one. There was more of a more noticeable improvement when I decided to add a few more segments to the antenna.
I’ve been running the new dongle for almost two weeks. There seems to be a very slight improvement over the old unit. It’s probably not enough to justify upgrading, in my opinion.
I was playing around with different gain settings and noticed that using --gain -10 in the PROG_ARGS line of /etc/init.d/fadump1090.sh, which enables the analog AGC in the tuner chip, seems to improve my results. Earlier using the same setting in my old dongle did not seem to help. My stats have been constantly improving as the leaves on the surrounding trees continue to fall, so it is not easy to make a firm judgement.
Did a test of that a while ago with the AGC on or off when air traffic around Toronto was at a peak during the evenings. With the AGC turned on, the off-air message rate was the highest in PP when compared to the AGC turned off.
