Ranking drop - faulty USB stick

FlightAware ADS-B Flight Tracking
1

Quick tip if you ever start experiencing a drop in your ranking, more greyed out blocks of no reports in your statistics and sometimes no aircraft in your PiAware Skyview (1090 dump local live view). Your FlightAware USB stick may be on its way out.

After trying all kinds of software work to no avail (fresh Raspberry PI image with the latest updates including firmware and kernel updates) I finally changed out the USB stick for a new one, a USB Pro Stick Plus. And voila, there were all the aircraft in my live view!

My old USB Pro Stick lasted just one year, oh well. Hopefully my new USB Pro Stick Plus will do better.

By the way, the September Raspberry PI OS release with newest up-to-the-minute updates (sudo apt-get update, sudo apt-get dist-upgrade as well as sudo rpi-update) work flawlessly with PIAware 3.5.3 and 1090 dump 3.5.3. I ran all the OS updates prior to downloading PIAware.

2

I had the same thing happen. My stick was bought in February 2017 and it turned out to be overheating and not picking up and signals. I am not sure if there is any warranty on these?

3

i use the cheap 12$ china dongles since more than 2 years and to prove possible degrading bought a new one 2 weeks ago. as i have two sites running from the same antenna within about 1% tolerance it was easy to test the new against the old dongles - result at my site zero difference - both old dongles have exactly the same results as the new one has. both old dongles ran on my unoccupied loft where in summer the temperature is very often between 35-40 degree celsius.

4

I am using this $9 dongle from eBay/China since 2013 (4 years now). Never noticed any degradation.

DVB-T Black-2