Some noob questions about setting up a box

FlightAware ADS-B Flight Tracking
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Back in the MSDOS/Win 3.1 days, I set up a PC and mailed it to my mother in law so that she and my wife could chat via AOL and/or CompuServ instead of bankrupting me with long distance bills.

The MIL had never used a computer before, so I spent several hours on the phone with her, helping her set up her modem and connection, and how to launch the 2 or 3 programs that she would need.

After about a week, she called me and said that her new computer was “messing up”. After more interrogation than should have been required, I learned that she had bought a book, to learn more, and decided to try out some of the commands to try to free up some hard drive space.

C:\deltree *.*

I told her to box it up and send it back so I could fix it. That was in 1993… Hope to get it shipped back out next week! :grin:

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That will not work as the command is not available any longer on Windows :slight_smile:

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We all have the customer stories, like plugging the power strip into itself and calling tech support for a dead computer. Or the newby airman system operator in the early '90s experimenting on a Sun Unix box and did the ‘rm -r *’ to remove all the files from his system. He also then learned how to do full installs. I spoke with an early developer of the UNIX system, and he explained this was created on purpose. We were all newbys at one time and learned more about how the computer worked by messing it up and then having to fix our stupidity. The developers understood human behavior and realized they could not prevent stupid mistakes. Peer pressure and humor taught many of us the impact of doing things before we thought about just what command we were about to use. I have seldom learned much by doing things right, and I have always learned much more by making mistakes and then having to figure out just what really happened and fixing it before it affected my coworkers. Same things happens in hobbies and life. Have fun out there.

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Working in IT customer help since 25 years now. I know all of the stories.
Most famous (really happened during times before flat screens): What do you see on your screen currently? Answer: picture in a wooden frame of my cat"

But nobody was born with IT skills. So it would be a shame to laugh about others.

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A follow up… Yeah, I gave up on trying to use Windows on these old PCs to set up a feeder.

In my OCD days long debate in my head about which Pi to buy - 3 or 4, how much ram, where to buy, hey, these power supplies on the newer ones are a couple amps? Maybe the power savings of pi vs, old PC isn’t that big, would newer version / more RAM be a better purchase for resale or using for another project that might want more ram, etc, Someone mentioned this page:

Anyone hear of that site? Anyone using this to feed?

on one of the old PCs, I had things up and running within a couple hours (which for me at least, is kinda fast).

Or at least I thought things were up and running. no planes are overhead / nearby to see if the SDR is actually receiving things and getting it in the PC / apps / feeding.

Then I realize - it’s kinda late in the evening (less flights), covid is going on (less flights) and worse,… we live about 10 miles from Trump National Golf Course here in NJ. And Trump is there this weekend. So there’s a TFR (practically no flights).

This AM, planefinder shows zero in the stats / history.

BUT 127.0.0.1:8080, another window I left open shows a few planes. in the area. That map says flightaware piaware skyaware.

Are those planes I see? Or the flightaware itself/ I zoom out. no other planes show.

I go back to GitHub - tsunghanliu/adsb-box.snap: a snap to build a ADS-B receiver station, the page I was following last night for what to do… I claim my feeder under the piaware section.

Go to my flightaware/stats page… and it shows activity!

Some questions:
i1. s my site number / mac / unique id something I should keep private?
2. Anything look unusual in the screen so far?
3. Anyone work with this ADS B Box app? I still want to get feeds to other sites working / will likely have more quesrtions.
4. according to the bottom left graph - I saw 300+ planes overnight?! (Interesting - I was feeding flightaware even before I claimed / knew I was feeding it.)
5. I thought I was only doing ADS-B… what’s that ‘other’ category with 35 planes?
6. at the bottom showing nearby users, they have usernames displayed. I see my name… do they see my name / can I see their name? can I change their view to see my username?

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That Skyaware map shows you the aircraft that you are directly receiving yourself; it’s purely local data.

Site number doesn’t matter. You probably want to keeep MAC & feeder ID private.

We maintain the historical data for all sites, claimed or unclaimed; when you claim the site, it’s just making an association between your user account and the existing unclaimed site.

ADS-B uses the Mode S radio protocol for transmitting its position data. There are older Mode-S-only transponders that do transmit Mode S, but don’t transmit ADS-B; dump1090 will hear these aircraft too. “other” is aircraft that were heard on Mode S, but for which there was no position data.

You can control this under the “FlightAware Community Features” section of Join FlightAware - FlightAware

(Note that you generally always see your own full info when you’re logged in; try viewing your site in an incognito session, or while logged out, to see what everyone else sees)

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The article is dated July 23rd, so only 2 days old. I would assume that not many tried it so far.

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