Today is the first anniversary of replacing my Pi3B+ with a Pi4 and I thought it’d be interesting to post an update. I wasn’t sure whether to put it in here or the Covid Trends thread but as it specifically reflects on the last year of the Pi4, I thought this was a better place.
I make no excuse for the large image, it’s a complete capture of the entire graphs page. You’ll have to click on it to see it full size.
Things that I think are interesting:
You can clearly see the Christmas dip and then a few days after, there’s a big peak in aircraft seen and tracks which is down to that massive tropo opening at the end of December. My maximum range was good but I had better later in the year when there were fewer aircraft in the skies.
The storms hit the UK in February and did a lot of damage to my aerials, resulting in the ADS-B aerial slowly tilting from vertical to horizontal polarisation. This is clear on the graphs and you can see exactly when I was able to finally take the broken hexbeam down and put the ADS-B aerial back up on top in early March.
Then Covid hit and there’s a constant trend downwards from March with a summer peak but nowhere near what I was hoping for. I had thought that I’d be challenging the world top ten on the statistics page but that didn’t happen this year. We’re now firmly in the winter schedules and significantly lower than this time last year. My figures are even lower than they were using the Pi3B+ at this time last year.
Keeping the Pi4 cool has been a little bit of a challenge and that’s been documented elsewhere on these forums. I badly modified the official Pi PoE HAT and made the cooling less efficient when I wanted to make it more efficient so I worked round that with an additional fan.
One thing I can’t explain is how the Disk I/O - IOPS graph has changed in steps, sometime around early September and again then a few weeks ago. My other Pi tracker which uses a 3B+ and an RTL-SDR dongle shows exactly the same reductions in writes at the same time. I wonder if something has changed in how either one of the add-ons writes to the card. Perhaps @wiedehopf has an answer to that.
The weekly peaks in disk reads and the bandwidth show clearly when I started running scheduled overnight backups of the SD card.
When I made my original post which mentioned the store, wiedehopf said this:
I’ve finally done this although it’s half way down the garden, not actually on the mast. I did consider putting it on the mast but thought it might be affected by the aerials. It’s working really well and the aerial now turns and faces into the wind as the gusts increase.
Here we are, a year further on.
I have no real plans to make any modifications to my setup as I think it’s pretty much optimal now.