I am just getting started on this adventure, my radio has not even been delivered yet. But I can build my HyperV instance on the home server, install a Debian OS (Raspbian Desktop), and get the environment ready.
One issue I can see on the horizon is how to get the VM to talk to the USB device? I have mounted USB drives before in HyperV machines but never an interface device. Can somebody point me at a guide or some references on what settings need to be made to get this working?
Side question, in order to recieve on 1090mhz and also 978mhz using an outdoor antenna, do i need to do two antennas?
My house has a steel roof, could I cheap out and use the magnetic pigtail antenna out thru the wiring port and stuck to the roof?
It may be possible to get the rtl dongle working ok with usb pass through, but you may find that mlat either does not work, or is unreliable. This is because it uses a timestamp on each usb packet to calculate positions in conjunction with other receivers, and the slight delays caused by virtualisation can introduce enough timing error to make mlat fail.
If you aren’t bothered by this, then decoding should work ok.
It’s normally better to run the decoder on the machine natively, but it doesn’t need a lot of power to do that which is why a raspberry pi or similar is ideal.
Ideally, yes you would have an antenna for each frequency you are monitoring. They need to be slightly different lengths for each one for best performance. It would be possible to use a single one with some kind of splitter, but performance would suffer somewhat.
Yes, but the performance wouldn’t be great. Those antennas aren’t the best, but are good enough for testing.
Would that take the form of 2 antennas connected to an SMA Y-splitter, and wired back to the USB dongle? or two USB dongles?
I am having second thoughts about pursuing the VM idea. I have a Pi3B on hand. I just need to power it properly, probably with a POE hat. there is POE available in the network closet, and the antenna wires will route to that closet anyhow.
You need two dongles. They don’t have enough bandwidth to cover both frequencies at the same time. To use the same antenna you’d need some kind of splitter (which is more than just a y-cable with two connectors on the output) in order to adequately separate both receivers and ensure the signal is distributed properly to both.
It’s much better to use a dedicated antenna, one for each, however as using one means the antenna will be a compromise.
A pi 3 should be adequate to run both dongles and will probably be less hassle ruing to use a VM.
