Update: I have ordered a Jetvision Active Diapason High Gain Antenna 1090MHz 4dBi + 17dB
I’m going put it where the spider and fully functional LNA currently are and move the LNA from there to the Jetvision A3 antenna that I got last week.
Hopefully, that will give me a good increase in performance on both receivers.
For the record, my RTL-SDR Blog Triple Filtered LNA also died after 18 months. Replaced by an Uputronic also … 4 years old and still OK (even if a little less efficient than the RTL-SDR one).
This antenna has already an LNA included. Adding another LNA would cause issues with signals beeing too strong.
Just for getting this mentioned, in case somebody is thinking about it. 
I thought it would be obvious from the fact that I am going to replace the spider and LNA with an active antenna.
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I’ve stopped assuming in online discussion boards something as “obvious” 
Do you know if they designed the jetvision A3 as well? I saw it was made in Italy.
I have no information about Jetvision A3
EDIT
I have photo of interrior of a Jetvision PCB antenna. Not sure if it is A3 or some other model.
My Jetvision A3 with GPS integrated is Made in France as said by the sticker on it.
Update.
My jetvision Active Diapason Antenna has not arrived yet but while I’m waiting for it I thought that, since they have been running as they are for a week, I’d switch the A3 and the spider between the ‘bad’ LNA and the ‘good’ LNA to see what difference it makes.
The A3 certainly brings in a lot more than the spider and I’ve had to turn down the gain on the stick a notch. Surprising though, even though they are basically the same, the spider that has been on the ‘good’ LNA since day one actually seems better than the one that was on the ‘bad’ LNA from day one so I haven’t lost quite as much as expected.
Looking forward to getting my new active antenna though. Watch this space…
my jetvision active diapason arrived this morning and has been fitted in place of the ‘bad’ triple filtered LNA and the best spider. TBH, I am rather underwhelmed by it so far.
It is better than what it replaced but not by a factor of 10. It ended up costing me almost £200 by the time I has paid import duties and VAT where as the LNA cost me less than £20 and the spider was virtually cost fee because it was made from scrap.
Having had one of the triple filters fail, the two feeders were no longer the same so I bought a Uputronics LNA and replaced the ‘good’ triple filtered LNA on the other feeder with it.
The feeders now have very similar range and message count again.
I’ll post some graphs in a few days when I have a better idea of the overall performance compared to how it was with the old setup.
Sometimes it simply depends on the geographical environment.
In my setup it does not matter if i am using the 5dB Jetvision or the 9dB Vinnant. Even a simple spider performs similar.
But i cannot remove the mountains around me.
Here is a bit of an update.
As a test, I now have three feeders as follows:
feeder 1 has a jetvision A3 and Uputronics LNA
feeder 2 has a jetvision Active Diapason
feeder 3 has a spider and a RTL-SDR Triple Filtered LNA
In this configuration, there is very little difference between them in terms of range, number of messages or aircraft seen when looking at the maps. Over time though the difference becomes obvious in the online stats.
The difference becomes much more noticeable if I swap the Uputronics and RTL-SDR between the A3 and the spider, because as others have observed, there is a clear performance difference between them.
edited due to incorrect info
Are they all at the same location? For how long did you run the tests?
Based on the traffic you should test each combination at the same location for a minimum of a week to get reliable values.
All three feeders are running 24/7.
The antennae on feeder 1 and 2 are in the same places in the loft they have been for five years - as high as possible under the ridge tiles equidistant from the centre line of my house.
I did that so that I can compare the results over the next week or so against the results from the past few years.
The antenna for feeder 3 is half way between the locations of those antennae.
The range, message rate and number of aircraft seen remained very similar between the three feeders so I swapped the Uputronics and RTL-SDR triple filtered LNAs between feeder 1 and feeder 3.
The jetvision A3 and RTL-SDR Triple Filtered LNA on feeder 1 is now outperforming the jetvision active diapason on feeder 2 by quite a margin in terms of range and number of aircraft seen.
The range, message rate and number of aircraft seen by the spider and Uputronics LNA on feeder 3 reduced to the point where it was no longer worth running it so it has been shut down.
Forgot to mention that I replaced the cables (RG6 U with F connector to SMA pigtails each end) with LMR195 SMA - SMA cables and saw no discernable difference.
