Yesterday, I updated PiAware from version 10.2 to 11.1. Apart from the update, the technical setup—location, receiver (USB Pro Stick), and antenna—remained unchanged; yet, from one day to the next, I noticed a drop of about 65–70% in the number of aircraft detected. I’m not sure what’s causing this. Unfortunately, I don’t recall the previous settings, but the current ones are:
adaptive-dynamic-range = yes
rtlsdr-gain = max
…and I don’t think the rtlsdr-gain = max setting was changed. I don’t know what else to check to identify the problem.
Do you have graphs1090 installed? It might give a hint.
Does it improve if you power cycle the Pi?
No, no changes after restart the Pi
I installed graphs1090 now, but of course it needs to populate with data, and that takes time.
My settings are:
adaptive-dynamic-range = yes
rtlsdr-gain = max
Unfortunately, I don’t remember the settings used for PiAware 10.2, but if the new version (11.1) doesn’t alter them, then they were the same.
Generally, my range dropped by about 30–60 miles; the rest can be seen in the graphs on my FlightAware.com profile.
I found an SD card image of my Piaware system from 2023 in my archives and checked the following files:
- piaware-config
- dump1090-fa
The contents of these files appear identical to those in the current, working version 11.1.
So, the question remains: what caused the drop in ADS-B reception performance after upgrading the system from 10.2 to 11.1?
As you can see, reception parameters have dropped over the last two days—specifically, since the Piaware system update. I haven’t touched the configuration at all.