Replace a RasPi2b with a RasPi4?

I am running piaware with a FlightAware Pro Stick Plus and I was curious if replacing the older Raspberry Pi 2B with a newer Raspberry Pi 4 would result in a higher message or aircraft rate than what I am seeing now?


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It does not look like the CPU is pegged or anything, but I was not sure if there would be any advantage to upgrade the CPU? Does the fact that I am using an EDIMAX USB wifi connection influence the overall performance?
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It may be possible to get better performance with an RPI4.
On the older models, the ethernet, USB, WiFi and SD card all share a USB 2.0 bus.
I think the SD card and ethernet are separated on the RPI4.

Also, the graphs don’t tell the whole story. They are normally 60/300 second or 1/5 minute polls. A lot can happen in 1-5 minutes.

You may be better off with tuning the gain settings, trying a filter or a better filter, raising the antenna or using better coax. Can you provide more details of your setup?

A pi 2 is perfectly adequate to run an rtl dongle. You won’t see any performance improvement by just changing to a pi 4. I was using a pi 2 and seeing message rates up to 1600/s with 250 aircraft. Changing to a pi 4 made no difference whatsoever to that.
You can see from the CPU graph, that the ADS-B CPU utilisation is only about 25%, so has plenty to spare.
A pi 4 is worthwhile if you are going to be doing something more demanding - for example running an airspy dongle, or if you want to run something like VRS or flightairmap.

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I am using RPi 2B+ heavily as shown below, but cpu usage is quiet low (please see screenshot below).

Antenna-1 >> dvbt-1 >> dump1090-1 >> port 30005 >> feeders-1 to multiple sites.

Antenna-2 >> dvbt-2 >> dump1090-2 >> port 31005 >> feeders-2 to multiple sites.

  • 2 antennas connected to 2 dongles plugged into single RPi 2B+
  • 2 instances of dump1090-mutability
  • 2 instances of piaware (Stn 5252 & 6396)
  • 2 instances of fr24feed (Stn CYYZ9 & CYYZ21)
  • 2 instances of pfclient
  • 2 instances of adsbexchane feeders
  • 1 instance of rb24feed
  • 1 instance of opensky-network feeder
  • 1 instance of wiedehopf’s graphs

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