One RPi and two dongles, is it possible?

FlightAware ADS-B Flight Tracking
1

Hi.

I have several antennas and dongles, but only one RPi.

Is it possible use only one RPi and connect two or more dongles for load aircraft to FA from different locations in my place?

Thanks!

idoleo2001

2

Yes and no.

You will need a Pi 2, a Pi 1 doesn’t really have enough CPU to run multiple receivers. Two receivers on a Pi2 is possible. Three may work, but you may run into power/USB bandwidth issues.

You will need good power, probably a separate powered USB hub. Short USB cables are a good plan too. If your antennas are physically far apart, you may have problems with either long feedlines or long USB cables, neither are good.

The current version of piaware doesn’t like running two copies on the same Pi. You will need to run one piaware and combine the receiver data before feeding it to piaware (e.g. use socat to pipe data from each receiver to an aggregator dump1090, then have that aggregator provide data to piaware). mlat will not work with this setup.