Output from Mode-S Beast to Piaware ?

FlightAware ADS-B Flight Tracking
1

Hi there,
I’m completley new to Flight Tracking, still learning al lot.
A this moment I have two receivers:
1 Mode-S Beast, connected to a Windows PC (serial) and working fine in Virtual Radar Server.
1 USB RTL dongle with the R820T2 chip, connected on a RaspBerry Pi with Piaware.

All is working, BUT: The signal from the USB is terrible. :frowning: (Only a couple of KM)

My question: Is it possible to “feed” PiAware with output from the Beast ?
(My Raspberry knowledge is almost zero, still learing.)

I was thinging to send output from VRS (Beast) to Piaware on port 3005, but what do i have to change in Piaware, and is that possible ?

Kind regards,
Tonny

2

You should be able to get much better performance than that with the dongle (350km+ is possible), but the Beast is probably going to be better regardless of what you do there.

You can feed output from the Beast to piaware, but it’s not directly supported (yet), you will need to set up the connection between piaware and VRS manually.
The next version of piaware will make this a bit simpler, and eventually (the timing on this depends on a few things) will let you directly connect the Beast to the Pi via USB.

If you set up VRS to listen on some port 12345 (doesn’t have to be exactly that, whatever port you want) and provide Beast-format output there, and then run a socat tunnel from the shell on the Pi:



$ socat -U TCP-LISTEN:30005,fork,reuseaddr TCP-CONNECT:vrshostnameoripgoeshere:12345

that should, in theory, work. You’ll need to disconnect the rtlsdr dongle or stop dump1090 first. If that works, the next step is to get it working automatically on reboot…

3

I wil give it a try, setting it up should not be a problem.
2 questions:

1] Will the modification all disapear when i reboot Piaware ?
2] Can you tell me how to “stop dump1090” ? :blush:

I found a problem with the connector on my USB dongle, and now it is picking up a lot more traffice.
Beast however sees many more.

4

For stopping dump1090 enter “sudo /etc/init.d/dump1090 stop” at a console session.

If you dont want a automatic startup, look for update-rc.d https://www.debuntu.org/how-to-managing-services-with-update-rc-d/ or for a quick and dirty solution just rename the dump1090 file in /etc/init.d with “mv /etc/init.d/dump1090 /etc/init.d/dump1090.old”

HTH

5

I have been playing with the mentioned solutions, but could not get it working.
Also found out that the mcx connector on the USB Dongle was not having good contact.
After fixing that, the range is now around 150km for the dongle, that is fine for now.

Stopping the dump1090 i did with with:


sudo /etc/init.d/fadump1090.sh stop

After installing SOCAT, i put in this command:

socat -u TCP-LISTEN:30005,fork,reuseaddr TCP-CONNECT:192.168.xx.xx:31003

192.168.xx.xx is the address from my VRS server.

But PiAware only show lots of errors…


[2016-03-20 17:28 CET] mlat(2424): Beast-format results connection with localhost:30104: [Errno 111] Connection refused
[2016-03-20 17:28 CET] 80999 msgs recv'd from socat (18 in last 5m); 80934 msgs sent to FlightAware
[2016-03-20 17:28 CET] ADS-B data program 'socat' is listening on port 30005, so far so good
[2016-03-20 17:28 CET] Starting faup1090: /usr/lib/piaware/helpers/faup1090 --net-bo-ipaddr localhost --net-bo-port 30005 --stdout --lat xx.xxx --lon x.xxx
[2016-03-20 17:28 CET] Started faup1090 (pid 4490) to connect to socat
[2016-03-20 17:28 CET] mlat(2424): Beast-format results connection with localhost:30104: [Errno 111] Connection refused
[2016-03-20 17:29 CET] mlat(2424): Beast-format results connection with localhost:30104: [Errno 111] Connection refused
[2016-03-20 17:29 CET] mlat(2424): Beast-format results connection with localhost:30104: [Errno 111] Connection refused

I’ll just wait for an newer version of PiAware, hopefully it is possible then to provide input easier.
(Would be nice if i can send a feed directly from ModeSMixer2 to PiAware)

6

The mlat-client message is harmless, it’s just telling you that it can’t connect to dump1090 to feed mlat results back (which is how the default configuration is set up).