I’d say even very very slight amounts of tropo can increase the range.
So … i’d put this down to weather rather than antenna.
But it’s almost impossible to tell!
For what it’s worth I haven’t seen any significant change in range over the same period:
The gap is from when I had to completely rebuild my feeding pi though as something got corrupted and it wouldn’t boot. I switched to the 64 bit kernel as a test and though there hasn’t been any noticeable change in decoding performance, the 64 bit airspy decoder does seem to use about 10% less cpu with the same settings:
That’s the thing, as you know, I’ve been into radio for well over thirty years and the weather this week really hasn’t been conducive to good radio conditions. Tropo normally appears on the lower bands before it hits 1090MHz and I’ve not seen a trace of it.
I’ll keep an eye on mine and see if it stays that little bit higher. I did one other thing, I often had birds sitting on the balun for my 40m aerial which is right at the base of the Jetvision aerial so I wrapped a few cable ties around it, with the points lose and facing upwards to dissuade them from parking their little feathered bums on it
I can only dream of this number of positions now. Just about getting a third of these on a ‘busy’ day
An updated video - I bought a drone today and quite literally the first thing I did (once I figured out how to turn it on) was to take it up to just slightly higher than my ADS-B aerial and do a full 360° pan around.
My ADS-B aerial comes into view at around 20 seconds.