There have been lots of articles in the press here in the US about the pentagon’s lack of funding to upgrade their aircraft. See https://www.aviationtoday.com/2019/08/19/military-2936-aircraft-ads-b-jan-1-air-force-says/
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I must regrettably agree with this assessment, but understandable given its relative lack of popularity. Not to put too fine a point on it, but it’s pretty clear that CONUS and Western Europe are more than saturated with 1090 receiver coverage. I doubt the FA network benefits from additional 1090 receivers at this point.
978, on the other hand, has much less coverage. There are no stats on % of total feeders that are 978, but running through the top 250 sites on the FA page suggests maybe 1 in 20 or 1 in 30 are reporting 978. That, combined with a practical max reception range of 30-40 miles for UAT (since these GA aircraft are usually below 5,000 feet), suggests that the startup and troubleshooting documentation should be revised/updated/simplified so as to encourage new feeder sites.
It was a PITA making heads or tails of the existing instructions when I set about adding 978 to my 1090 back in April. Too many nuances to it, and with nothing but open-ended forum searching to get answers, you don’t know what’s accurate and current information. Case in point, I acted on the best info I could find earlier this year, which suggested that separate RPi’s were necessary given power supply and interference concerns from having two dongles on a single RPi. Fast forward to about a month ago, and I was told by a reputable member that the power and interference concerns were outdated and I never needed the second RPi. And now:
So frankly the 978 subject could do with better organization and a single source of truth that is kept current.
There is no single source of truth especially when it comes to “how should I do this?” because there are many ways of setting it up and many different bits of hardware involved. Whether you can successfully run 978 on the same Pi as 1090 will depend on your exact setup; that’s why you’re seeing apparently conflicting information. All I can really do is point out the potential gotchas like I did above. While it’s entirely possible to run both on a single Pi, we also get regular posts from people who run into problems doing that. The most common problem is poor quality power.
If you want a turnkey 978+1090 hardware+software setup that “just works”, that doesn’t really exist at the moment; it’s still at the hobbyist stage and you are going to have to do some experimentation.
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I second this. UAT is quite popular in the GA market, given the low cost uAvionix skyBeacon and tailBeacon products.
Speaking for myself, and I’m sure many others, your diligent guidance and dedication to helping every FA member succeed is really amazing. Funny thing is, I consider you my best single source of truth here! I just loathe having to resort to new posts/questions and being “that guy” who gets admonished for overlooking an answer buried somewhere in an old thread : >
The latest I’ve seen is that a powered USB hub will solve both the power draw concern and the space constraint on the RPi.
Which makes it very rewarding in its own right! Stepping back, and aside from the quirks of setting up 978 together with 1090, it seems a few things are impeding growth of the 978 community:
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The relative sparseness of 978 coverage isn’t emphasized enough. A new 1090 feeder site in CONUS or Western Europe is probably not going to pick up an aircraft that isn’t already reported by dozens or hundreds of other sites, and I doubt that the MLAT contribution has much significance when you’re “synchronized with 500 nearby receivers.” With UAT, it’s likely that you’re picking up and reporting GA aircraft that aren’t in range of another UAT site. There’s a sort of intrinsic satisfaction from owning that unique contribution, and that could be emphasized more.
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Many members respond to the “gamification” aspect of the hobby with feeder rankings. It certainly pushes many to invest in and experiment with their equipment to squeeze out every last inch of range. The FA rankings don’t separate out 1090 from 978, or at least allow a “978 only” rankings list. Since UAT traffic barely moves the needle in the overall 1090+978 ranking approach, the push for range, and the discourse on antenna, amplifier and filter design, has been 99.9% focused on 1090. A dedicated 978 rankings list would broaden community interest, spark competitive development, and encourage deeper discourse.
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A combined 1090 and 978 map would be neat (“out of the PiAware box”) but I understand it’s at least on the product roadmap. Incidentally, regarding a dual-frequency board, I’d imagine it’s all but impossible in the footprint of the current FA dongle. From the looks of options like this Dual SDR Receives Two Bands At Once | Hackaday it would have to be a standalone box.
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I suspect that there is significantly more UAT traffic out there than people realize. I wouldn’t be surprised if 25+% of the GA fleet is outfitted with UAT. It would be really great if FA focused on making it easy to deploy UAT capable receivers.
As far as i know it’s relevant in the US only, for the rest of the world it’s not significant
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