How to Install and Configure Piaware 5.0 SD card image - Quickstart Guide

No it won’t be great but was working ok on ADSB, and UAT when I had it set up for that a few months ago. Flat land out here so signals carry for quite a distance. Can’t climb the tower put out my back this week so what’s up there has to do for now. Was getting more than 100nm range on UAT with this antenna when I first tried dump978 and 250nm range on ADSB, but that was one receiver at a time.
Using ethernet POE to power the Pi here not sure the capacity but seems to work.

That’s not unlikely.

The canakit or official RPi 3 power supply seem to provide good results.

The trick isn’t so much the rating in Amps but also providing 5.2V instead of 5V so that the voltage drop via the cable and protection circuitry on the pi is compensated.

Why not make a quarter wave antenna (spider)? Those are not that frequency specific and if you make one for around 1040 MHz it’ll probably be much better than the colinear.

Also with a splitter you would probably want a amplifier before the splitter.
(there seem to be 950 MHz to 2000 MHz satellite amplifiers that work well)

It might be nice to add a link under step 3 to a page describing how to find the “Feeder ID” like : How Piaware Feeders are Identified by Feeder ID

That page needs updating so it states the user page has it under “Unique Identifier” . Finding it in the log file can mean a lot of scrolling… I would suggest plans on getting piaware-config to output this somehow…

Thanks for this update and all the details!

Revised to include links

Thanks guys,
I’ve been wrestling with the UAT setup for a while (found out my RTL dongle was broken.)
Today I am up and running on 3.7.0.1 with UAT feed in under 30 minutes!
Can’t wait to track our RV-12 with it.

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I’m probably in a unique situation. I have a FlightFeeder and also wanted to have 978 UAT to track my plane. I just set up a PiAware but it is not working. It could be due to the fact that I only set up the 978 UAT dongle. I do not have a second dongle for 1090 since my FlightFeeder provides that service. I have the following error for 1090:

pi@piaware:~ $ sudo systemctl status dump1090-fa
● dump1090-fa.service - dump1090 ADS-B receiver (FlightAware customization)
   Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/dump1090-fa.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
   Active: activating (auto-restart) (Result: exit-code) since Sat 2019-04-06 22:58:46 UTC; 8s ago
     Docs: https://flightaware.com/adsb/piaware/
  Process: 2134 ExecStart=/usr/share/dump1090-fa/start-dump1090-fa --write-json /run/dump1090-fa --quiet (code=exited, status=1/FAILURE)
 Main PID: 2134 (code=exited, status=1/FAILURE)

Apr 06 22:58:46 piaware systemd[1]: dump1090-fa.service: Unit entered failed state.
Apr 06 22:58:46 piaware systemd[1]: dump1090-fa.service: Failed with result 'exit-code'.

978 Status:

sudo systemctl status dump978-fa
● dump978-fa.service - dump978 ADS-B UAT receiver
   Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/dump978-fa.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
   Active: active (running) since Sat 2019-04-06 22:58:15 UTC; 8min ago
     Docs: https://flightaware.com/adsb/piaware/
 Main PID: 2029 (dump978-fa)
   CGroup: /system.slice/dump978-fa.service
           └─2029 /usr/bin/dump978-fa --sdr driver=rtlsdr,serial=00000978 --raw-port 30978 --json-port 30979

Apr 06 22:58:16 piaware dump978-fa[2029]: Found Rafael Micro R820T tuner
Apr 06 22:58:16 piaware dump978-fa[2029]: Reattached kernel driver
Apr 06 22:58:16 piaware dump978-fa[2029]: Detached kernel driver
Apr 06 22:58:17 piaware dump978-fa[2029]: Found Rafael Micro R820T tuner
Apr 06 22:58:17 piaware dump978-fa[2029]: Exact sample rate is: 2083333.135571 Hz
Apr 06 22:58:17 piaware dump978-fa[2029]: [R82XX] PLL not locked!
Apr 06 22:58:17 piaware dump978-fa[2029]: SoapySDR: using maximum manual gain 49.6 dB
Apr 06 22:58:17 piaware dump978-fa[2029]: SoapySDR: INFO: Using format CS8.
Apr 06 22:58:18 piaware dump978-fa[2029]: [::]:30978: accepted a connection from [::1]:32774
Apr 06 22:58:26 piaware dump978-fa[2029]: [::]:30978: accepted a connection from [::1]:32776

The Skyview 978 is not updating to my set location. It still default to the original location even though it is set in FlightAware. The site is up and the location is correct. The Skyview 1090 shows " Problem fetching data from dump1090." which is to be expected.

Are my issues due to the fact that I don’t have a 1090 Dongle? Is there any way around this without adding a second dongle?

@ggoldfingerd, @wiedehopf is smarter than me, so I’d just listen to him.

@wiedehopf, thanks for the tip on fixing the UAT map. I had not looked into that yet, but it was a minor annoyance.

Actually this is explained in the original post on the test release.
Announcing PiAware 3! (Latest version: 3.8.0) - #944 by esmathews :

sudo piaware-config receiver-type none
sudo piaware-config uat-receiver-type sdr
sudo systemctl restart piaware

receiver-type none basically turns off dump1090-fa so it doesn’t run at all.

To fix the location i wrote something a few posts up in this thread:

sudo sed -i 's/$LAT/$PIAWARE_LAT/;s/$LON/$PIAWARE_LON/' /usr/share/skyview978/start-skyview978
sudo systemctl restart skyview978

(fixes a minor bug)

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Great, thanks for the information. My 978 is now up and running. I just need to wait for some traffic.

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It can take a while! In 2 days I only recorded 8 aircraft with UAT before firing up a Pi that had both dongles.

When running both 1090 and 978, is there a way to track the numbers of 978? As far as I can tell, it’s not differentiated on the stats page yet, and I haven’t figured out any other way to track the daily tallies. It’ll be interesting to track the increase as 2020 approaches. Most of the pilots I know are planning to install something, but have not yet. We’re planning to install a tailBeacon once the TSO is approved (https://uavionix.com).

In theory it should work with any soapysdr driver (I’ve done some testing with a limesdr mini) but I don’t have an Airspy to test with.

The OVERFLOW error (and the SSI debug) means that dump978 (or something in the driver chain) isn’t keeping up with the incoming sample rate. Probably dump978 should tolerate this and continue rather than bailing out, but it seems strange that you’re getting that since the sample rate is the same as with a rtlsdr.

He is using a different format though, CS16.

You can’t get samples from airspy in CS8 format, i think.

Sure, but I wouldn’t expect the conversion to be dramatically more expensive.

Does the soapysdr framework do this automatically or would you have to modify dump978-fa for that?

Edit: Works fine for me. (No UAT aircraft close though so while it seems to be working i can’t be sure)

I’m sure FlightAware will eventually add a way to view UAT statistics. Fortunately for me I have a separate site for UAT so I can see that now. Mine logged 3 positions overnight. They were north of me which makes sense. I’m in Wyoming so I don’t expect much UAT traffic until the 2020 mandate. However I’m 80 NM from a Towered airport in Montana. I do expect to see UAT traffic there. I’m happy FlightAware is adding UAT.

I actually have the tailBeacon pre-ordered for my plane. What a great option compared to 1090 for less expensive aircrafts. I had the 1090 quoted for my plane and it was 3x the cost of the UAT. The tailBeacon will compliment my current Stratux device with ForeFlight. I already track every flight. Now I will also be able to see some of my flight in FlightAware.

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It uses a lot of CPU. I got 80% load on one core and 30% on another core.
That is on a rather fast CPU compared to an RPi or probably even compared to a Odroid:
Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-3320M CPU @ 2.60GHz

Also my software version is a little newer, i’m using debian unstable soapysdr0.6-module-airspy.

Can’t test if actual reception works due to lack of aircraft with UAT over here.

dump978-fa converts from a variety of input formats to an internal phase-magnitude representation; it already knows how to deal with CS16. You can ask soapysdr to provide a different format to the native format (this is what --format does) but any conversion happens in the driver so it’s unpredictable what’s supported, and it’s probably an extra unnecessary conversion anyway.

I am using a RTL-SDR and attempting to run a 978 only UAT receiver.
I’ve successfully loaded 3.7.0.1 and it works with dump1090. I see targets and data are transferred to FA.
When I disable the 1090 receiver and attach SDR dongle serial numbered 00000978 I have not been able to get dump978 to run.

Here’s the log resulting from that attempt:

  • – Logs begin at Thu 2016-11-03 17:16:43 UTC, end at Mon 2019-04-08 14:30:19 UTC
  • Apr 08 14:25:18 piaware systemd[1]: Started dump978 ADS-B UAT receiver.
  • Apr 08 14:25:18 piaware dump978-fa[407]: dump978-fa not enabled in /etc/default/
  • Apr 08 14:25:19 piaware systemd[1]: dump978-fa.service: Main process exited, cod
  • Apr 08 14:25:19 piaware systemd[1]: dump978-fa.service: Unit entered failed stat
  • Apr 08 14:25:19 piaware systemd[1]: dump978-fa.service: Failed with result 'exit

How do I enable dump978?

Are you using the sd-card image?

Maybe you just missed step 5? Or didn’t reboot after that?