Evening Everyone,
Curious about Radarcape… What makes it so much money? I understand it is more that just a dongle and it has gps. That being said, is it worth the money performance wise. Will i get better messages, distance or more planes? Also does having a dedicated GPS help MLAT perform better? Thanks all
It’s a good receiver. The reason it’s expensive is because it’s custom hardware for a niche market. It’s FPGA based, which means it does all its decoding in hardware rather than software. Before the advent of sdr dongles that was really the only way to do it.
They perform well and have some nice features. The combination of GPS receiver and FPGA decoding means they can time stamp messages a lot more accurately than with an rtl dongle which relies on stamping the USB samples. This means their own mlat network will be more accurate than those based on dongles. Whether that difference is significant enough to matter is a matter of opinion and you have to balance the fewer number of receivers giving coverage against that better accuracy. If you don’t have sufficient coverage from others where you are, the better accuracy isn’t going to help at all.
One drawback of the airsquitter version is that you can’t get raw data out of it unless you pay them for the ‘commercial’ version. That’s something I don’t find particularly appealing for what is effectively a software switch. There is nothing necessarily commercial about wanting to access the data you received with your receiver. The much more expensive radarcape doesn’t have that limitation.
Back when the mode-s beast and radarcape were first released you probably couldn’t match them for performance. Personally I’m not convinced the value proposition holds up so well these days, at least for hobby use. If you want something that is completely standalone and works out of the box they are a good solution. If you are happy to put it together yourself, you can match their performance with a decent antenna, filtered LNA and airspy since the decoder was improved so much.
You won’t get more distance. ADS-B range is largely determined by geography once you get a decent external antenna. You likely won’t get more aircraft or messages either.
Caius,
Thank you so much for the detailed information! Looking at the specs of the processor and such, it is basic at best. Currently on an airspy mini and a blue FA, overall looking for max performance and clean-er messages. What would be your recommendations w an LNA?
Thanks!
The processor doesn’t need to be particularly powerful since it’s only running the web interface and whatever feeder software. The CPU doesn’t need to do any decoding of the RF since that’s done in hardware.
If you can find one, one of the rtl-sdr.com filtered LNAs is probably the best option. The older ones have narrower filtering, but they were discontinued due to availability of components. They modified them with different filters, which weren’t quite so good but they have been out of stock on their site for some time now. Three months ago they said they are working on a replacement, but no sign of it yet. I’m hoping mine doesn’t succumb to lightning or static as it works very well.
Another alternative is the uptronics one, but that is a bit sensitive to nearfield transmissions overloading it. You might find it needs a cavity filter on the input, but if you are going to go that way you could just use a wider band LNA anyway.
Nooelec make a dual UAT/ADS-B one, and there is also one made by Airnav Radarbox.
I don’t have any experience of those other ones so I can’t give you a first hand recommendation.
I love Nooelec and use their hardware for 99% of my SDR usage but this one is a hard pass for me. Where do I start with this one. I guess with the major flaws.
Pretty sure caius was referencing their 2 LNAs for 1090/978 that sit on a common board:
https://www.nooelec.com/store/sawbird-plus-adsb.html
Can you tie a radarcape to ads-b, FA, etc.?
ADS-B is not an aggregator: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_Dependent_Surveillance–Broadcast
Sending data to aggregators from a radarcape is limited to a couple of options.
But you can run an extra pi with the radarcape as a network data source, then you can send data to whomever.
These are the feeders that my airsquitter supports. My Radarcape is down at the moment so I can’t check it.
More info here
Data Feeding
At least for adsbexchange, MLAT isn’t supported last i checked.