Not sure if you have neighbours, but what do they think you’re doing there? Searching ET or Elvis?
They know I can track aircraft but I’ve never gone into detail about anything else.
I’ve just updated my blog with the full details of what happened with the aerial from when it broke in the storms until it’s fixed.
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Excellent!
At least they are not suspect you creating chemtrails
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@keithma
Glad to know that your Inverted Umbrella Aerial 
is working again.
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Many of us have been fighting the chemtrails for years. Geoengineering.org is a good site to get up to speed on the spraying. This is what got me into ADS-b tracking in the first place, though I keep it up as I find this very interesting. Might sound like many of us are tin foil hat types, but long non dissipating trails in the sky are not normal. Contrails do not drip nor linger in the sky. When you find out what has been sprayed above you, you may believe more too. Hang in there. By the way, Love the antenna, considering a similar installation myself.
Nice approach, but the website you’re referring is not available.
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Conspiracy tinfoil hattery, no place in this thread, thank you very much.
Thanks. As you know, it works really well 
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Recinding Tin foil comments.
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I am turning 60 next year and i my time is too valuable to deal with this
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A friendly reminder that blogspam will not be tolerated. Please carry on.
Was that aimed at me?
/edit - Ahh no, I don’t think it was. Sorry, I got a notification and assumed it was for me at first.
No, you’re good @keithma. Glad you got everything back together.
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Just dropped the aerial for a quick tweak after the work last week. I’m very pleased to report that the tilt mechanism works perfectly. Previously I’d have had to use scaffolding to do this but with the tilt, it was easy to get the aerial down to ground level.
You can clearly see when the mast was at an angle, when the aerial was tilted to vertical and the reverse when it all went back up again
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wondering if you have installed some of these 360° alert lights flashing while it is moving.
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.
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Do not order too many Chinese takeaways, or they’ll maybe think you are a Chinese spy? 
How’s that shoulder?
I’ve ended up with a larger range of movement than was originally predicted. If I reach forward and up, I have almost as much movement with both arms although it’s uncomfortable to stretch that far and it hurts as I move it back. Sideways, I can raise my arm above shoulder level but the movement is coming from further up, not the actual shoulder itself. Moving my arm backwards, I can just manage to put my wallet in my back pocket and take it out but that’s it.
When I get towards the extremes of movement, it hurts. In fact, it still aches all the time and I still have to take painkillers before going to bed otherwise I just can’t lay down with any comfort. Insomnia hit me very badly earlier this year and the only way I can sleep properly now is with the aid of medication. It’s not psychological because if I take an identical looking placebo instead of the sleeping tablet, I don’t sleep.
I have little strength in my right arm. I was diagnosed earlier this year with a badly torn rotator cuff in that arm and was told that without surgery, it’ll never heal. Surgery would be difficult with a longer recovery period than when they put the plate in so that’s not going to happen.
When I reach out with my right arm, I generally have to support it with my left arm. If I pick up anything heavy without realising, I know about it for at least a week afterwards.
On a more positive note, I have enough movement to be able to drive properly. I was very concerned while I was in the early stages after surgery that I’d never be able to get behind the wheel of anything other than an automatic with a knob on the steering wheel but fortunately that’s not the case.
All in all, it’s not been a great year for me but it could have been worse. I still think back to that evening and realise I was lucky that I didn’t crack my skull open.
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I did some aerial work last weekend and one of the things I did was adjust the ADS-B aerial slightly as it wasn’t quite as secure as I’d like it and was picking up a few degrees of tilt in the wind.
I don’t know if it’s my imagination but my average range seems to be up a little bit over the last week. I haven’t noticed any tropo on the lower bands so I don’t think it’s down to conditions.
