Hi all,
For those of you with your antenna outdoors, how do you protect the USB adsb receiver from the weather? Since it is only a few inches from the antenna, I haven’t found a good way to protect it.
Haven’t done an outdoor setup but seems to me I’d have the antenna only outside and coax running inside to the USB dongle.
You don’t. You can run an antenna cable indoors. Add a drip loop to that, so water doesn’t drain indoors.
My dongle is three metres under my antenna encased in a small plastic bag secured at the coax and USB cable ends with self amalgamating tape for weatherproofing.
But here’s the real trick; to prevent condensation build up inside the plastic bag I have put in a couple of small silica gel bags, the type that come in older medicine pill boxes or those used in electronic gadget shipping etc.
My dongle, not always the same one, has been outside for about three years and before that I did the same with a Beast receiver.
In order to compensate for the loss of coax length I am using a 3m unpowered USB cable directly into the RPi3 via a small hole in my garage tidied up with some heavy duty sticky tape of the weather side and a faceplate on the inside.
I’ve done no testing to see if I lose information over data between having coax all the way to the the inside or USB cable to the mast. Who knows for sure, but I prefer less coax at 1090MHz.
Coax loss is not necessary bad. Depending on location, the signals can be very strong. My experince is that I had to lower the gain on my receiver some -12dB. That’s equal to a LOT of coax cable. 3-5 meters won’t be the end of the world.
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Thanks for the info everyone! I was under the impression the usb dongle had to be close to the antenna itself. If the dongle can be feet/meters away from the antenna, that changes things entirely. Still learning even now. Thanks!
See here attenuation tables: w4rp.com/ref/coax.html
For something like RG6 it’s 6.1dB for 100’ (30 m). LMR400 is even better.
Excellent,thanks!