Well, I don’t know if I can keep it all indoors. The only feasible way for me bring my cable inside would be under/around a window, and wiedehopf seems to believe that that won’t work well. It probably won’t be too much of a hassle to deal with outside, so that’s probably what I’ll do.
Each situation is different, but it’s always good to hear how other people deal with these issues. It’ll all work out in the end. Best of luck!
I just realized I’ve been playing with ADS-B reception and feeding Flightaware for almost 10 years, others here for much longer, @abcd567 for sure.
The early years were very active. For a couple of years I kept two setups running. One to use as a benchmark and another to experiment with.
After I tried everything I could think of and afford, the second setup was taken down. Only one is up and running to this day.
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My FA antenna is indoors at a large window, hanging with a string tied to antenna’s top. Other antenna (V-Stub DIY) is also installed indoors at the window.
I have advantage of height, as my apartment is several stories above ground, and my antennas have unobstructed view for about 180 degrees. Another advantage of the indoor-mounting is very short coax (about 1.0~1.5 meters) between antenna and SDR 
Click on Photo to See Larger Size
Yeah, I think that’s a very different setup from what I have. Mine is setup at ~20ft above ground right now, and there’s a fairly big hill a couple miles in front of it (which is blocking the low view of my local airport)
We’ve been all over the place, but if you go with a standalone RPi Z2W and live in a house, place everything in the garage, hanging off the rafters, including the antenna. This is where my setup is.
Granted that I don’t have a hill nearby, it may still be good enough, you won’t know until/unless you try.
I don’t do roofs or towers. Maintenance, when needed, is easy to do even in winter.
All my hamradio antennas are at ground level as well or reachable with a small step ladder.
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Lots of subjects being discussed here, but I tend to agree with what @Dxista has said. There are things that can be done to improve your site performance like using an Airspy mini rather than RTL-SDR dongle, however the improvement will be minimal. By far the biggest improvement that can be had is with a better antenna, or more specifically a better antenna location. But that’s the most difficult thing to change.
With regard to outside vs inside location of electronics, realize that none of the devices we are using (LNA, SDR dongle, Raspberry Pi, etc) is specified to work in extreme environments. Probably they work over 0 to 50C ambient if that. Also there are other environmental factors like humidity and condensation to consider. So that says keep the electronics inside if possible.
Very well stated! As for the quoted text…While much better than outdoors, my garage gets very hot in the summer. When I used the RPi3B+, it would throttle back on very hot days. I had to install a fan, one of those clamp-on types for indoor use, clamped to the rafters. The RPi Z2W has never complained, not yet at least.
I understand that “good enough” is not satisfying to everyone. 
More so when indoors. In my almost 10 years using this setup in my garage, I could not believe how much of a difference just 1 foot left/right/up/down shift would make to the overall performance.
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That’s another thing, I don’t like the idea of using a fan that’s running 24/7. Passive cooling only for the RPi 4. It runs at about 40 C.
I fully agree!
The FlightAware bot is telling me to shut up, to give others a chance to participate. Go for it!
My antenna is in the attic and I have seen that also. The only thing I could conclude is that I’m getting multipath reception and moving the antenna is changing the reflections off nearby objects.
That KMR 400 is exactly the cable I use for my outdoor setup and would highly recommend it. XRDS-
RF also manufactures variable lengths with the exact terminations you need for the 1090 configuration. I can send you a link for those if you require. I also have a mini coax cable to recommend as a window pass through should you like that. The flat cable pass throughs do NOT work well.
Is it like this? 
>>Simple cheap Walmart desk top fan for 10 bucks.
That is it!
Blah blah blah
The line above is to satisfy the FlightAware bot. Sometimes it tells me to shut up, other times that I’m not saying much. The rise of AI (Artificial Idiocy). 
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For some reason FlightAware (or is it Discourse) wants posts of at least 20 characters. Don’t know why. Also if you respond to the same person more than a few times, it suggests using e-mail. Sometimes, if you do a search for something, it says you searched for that before (even though you haven’t) and doesn’t do the search. Strange.
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My setup. And yes, the antenna is sitting on the handbook of telecommunications (coincidence, the parallel programming book which is bigger was already taken).
Airspy R2 and the Noolecs are bug safe. The airspy mini is not. They do not mind temperatures.
Edit: the noolecs have a quite powerful built-in LNA so you can easily take them for a ride
This is a link to the LMR 400 coax offering with the proper terminations.
This is a link to a possible window frame pass through like the one I currently use.
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I use a 1m length of RG316 as a window jumper. This connects via a weatherproofed adapter tucked underneath the outside window ledge to the RG58 running from the external antenna, then directly to the dongle inside. The window never gets opened, so there’s no repeated stress on the cable, it just sits there as it is, and seems to work reliably well.
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