The other day i noticed that for some odd reason, data has gone from ~2000 messages sec/ ~250 aircraft seen and for some unknown reason it plummeted to 300-600 messages per second and less than 100 aircraft. Rebooting seemed to fix the issue but it would come back some random amount of time later. This is a Pi 4, running 32 bit Bookworm on POE power (POE Hat). Flightaware package is added on along with other feeder packages. Has anyone ever seen anything like this? any suggestions? Thanks!
There are many reasons performance drops off.
Loose antenna connector, water ingress into the coax, damaged antenna, failing SD card and the very common āsoft power supplyā.
Checking the connections (at least at the bottom end) is easy. Try a different PSU is also easy (if you can get to the Pi).
A cheap ($1 ~ $2) USB voltmeter plugged into a spare USB port is very informative.
Thanks for your suggestions. The antenna is definitely not waterlogged, it was just checked last week and is wrapped in weatherproof 3m. Antenna has an SWR of about 1.3 so Iām happy with that. I tend to think that itās power related as well. I was using the POE hat but I removed it last night and plugged it in instead. So far it has been running excellent and showing ~300 aircraft and ~2300 messages/sec. Iām going to get a new SD as well as a USB voltage tester and see what I can find out.
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I am still incredibly perplexed by this. It does not appear to be a power or SD card issue. It dropped again today and only seemed to recover when the amplifier was removed so itās almost certainly the issue. Still going to do some more testing before deciding to buy another amp. Iāve attached a screenshot of graphs1090 where you can see the sudden drop in message and aircraft.
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Is there something changed in your surroundings ? New mobile phone transmission station maybe ? Did you try a filter before the amplifier ? What kind of amplifier are you using? It could be something is overloading the amplifier and that will result in the symptoms you are seeing.
So the setup is flightaware 1090 filter going to an Uptronics filter amp. Amp is feeding the flightaware pro stick plus. Running on a raspberry pi 4 that is POE powered. The amp is USB C powered. There is also a GPS dongle that feeds data to the ads-s programs. No new interference that i know of. It just randomly loses like half of the aircraft/messages randomly some time during the day. Rebooting does nothing nor does trying a different dongle. Only works when I remove the amp. I even used a different pi thinking something could be wrong with the one feeding. Iām going to try a different power supply for the amp next.
Is the amplifier maybe overheating ? Maybe you can check in graphs1090 ? Just trying to think what the issue might be.
I attached a screenshot of graphs1090 in my original post and you can see where it drastically changes. Amplifier is barely warm to the point itās not even noticeable really. The power LED is on when I power it. At this point Iām going to let it run for several more hours and sometime today change itās power supply brick, and see if thatās a possibility. Just want to make sure itās bad before spending $70 on a new one.
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The screenshot doesnāt display the temperature.I can see the change in traffic indeed but that was not the question.
I can imagine you want to be sure, it there no warranty on the item anymore?
Fairly certain there is no warranty left as iāve had it up and running for about 3 years. If you were asking about the pi temperature, it runs around the 52c area and doesnāt change much.
FA prostick has an LNA ā¦ itās not much worse than the uputronics.
Just take the uputronics out of the equation.
You should also check if you can get away without the filter in front or if it is beneficial.
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After testing over the last few days, it appears that the uptronics will work just fine for several hours but ultimately at some point it fails. It still āworksā but only shows ~75-100 aircraft and 6-700 messages per second. As soon as itās removed it jumps back to the usual ~250+ aircraft and 1800-2000 messages per second. I have a suspicion that the lightning/power surge got to it. Thank you all for your input!