My “sandbox” rig, sort of non-traditional receiver setup, but it is indeed running PiAware and MLAT, albeit not on a RPi, in a little corner of the K5TED ham shack. Antenna is in a NW facing window.
I haven’t got a photo of the inside of the enclosure and it’s nothing pretty, I will take one in the next day or so when I replace the fan inside the enclosure… But this is everything that’s up on the roof (not all is radar related) http://bha.al/radarantenna.jpg
That’s a 16 element CoCo made from RG6, not sure what brand, but at the time I was able to get VF for it so the lengths are as accurate as I could get them…
The box with the pipes is the radar Pi enclosure, PWM fan inside, controlled by the Pi and 1-wire temp sensor… Seems to be working well to stop the temperature from fluctuating so much it affects the clock in the SDR dongle…
The other bits up there are raspberryPi weather cams and wind sensors…
Radar range with FA Pro dongle and FA filter and the 2mtrs or so of RG6 from the Antenna down the pole into the box with filter directly connected and dongle connected straight to the filter (100km range rings): http://bha.al/radarrange-20160420.png
Trying to find a snapshot before I got the new gear…
click to enlarge: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/39745369/tm_reach_s.jpg
each ring is 25NM - outlines are theoretical reach <10,000ft, <20,000ft, <30,000ft and <40,000ft - colors are real reach <10,000ft light green, <20,000ft green, <30,000ft purple and >30,000ft red.
Here are a couple of pics of my antenna and range map. There’s nothing special about how my Pi sits inside the garage roof so I didn’t bother photographing that.
The antenna is set up on my garage and then up as high as I could get it (height is king!) as I’m in a valley and only 25m above sea level. It’s a homemade 8 element coco made out of RG6 → Perfect vision amp → 10 meters RG6 → 12VDC power injector for amp → mini circuits 1090MHz filter → Nooelec DVB Mini 2+ stick → powered USB hub → Rpi 2.
It’s recommended to leave it off as it tends to produce more bad than good results, I used to get lots of extreme spikes at impossible altitudes, turning the aggressive decoding off stopped this from happening…
Okay, no “AGGRESSIVE=” setting in my .conf file at all.
I thought the spikes were spurious at first as well but after clearing the map a couple of times over the past few months they keep coming back, so I’m guessing they are legit. Hey, I’ll take 'em…I need all the stats I can get!
Yeah, most of my data is above 30k feet. Some of the incoming/outgoing international flights are around 40-42k and some private jets 45k. Certainly helps the detection range!
Hi Peter,
You have to upload them to a photo sharing site then use the [ to point to them. I use PhotoBox but there are loads available.]( to point to them. I use PhotoBox but there are loads available.)
