I’m quite new to ADS-B tracking. I started last month and it all went really well. FA Pro Stick Plus, Raspi 4, spiderantenna and a nice range of more than 150 nm from within the building. From one minute to the other I lost the range down to 15 to 20 nm and the amount of aircrafts per day went down from >1200 to 200. This change happened when noone was at home. So no change of equipment, no change of antenna position, no SW change, nothing.
I thought of a broken stick sent it back. Yesterday I got a replacement and the range is still around 15nm. And also the amount of aircrafts is back at around ~200 per day.
Can anyone guide me around to figure out what happened?
I’m quite familiar with linux as os, so working in the shell is not a problem, but I don’t know where to start.
The SW I use is an install of openhabian (based on raspian), FR24 feeder, piaware and adbsexchange feeder.
I had a cat that did something to an antenna. Never sure just what, but I had to do the disconnect/reconnect and wiggle things a bit to get a receiver working correctly again. Perhaps replug all connections and connectors from antenna to the receiver dongle. Worth the quick try. Good luck
I stripped the whole installation down to the pure initial openhabian OS yesterday. And then started to install all feeders step by step. The problem appeared again after installing the readsb package.
I stepped this step back and re-configured the flightradars dump1090-mutability to handle also the feeds to FA and adbsexchange.
That’s a decoder.
You can’t have the issue without a decoder.
And the actual demodulation between the alternatives is pretty similar, so they should result in roughly the same message rate / range.
So the most likely cause for your issue would be configuring a gain that’s too high or too low.
@obj
Thanks for the hint. Currently I’m so glad, that is ‘only’ a software issue and not a second damaged device
@wiedehopf
As I pointed out, I just started with the whole topic. I’m not deeply in that topic but does the readsb library changes the values for gain on it’s own?
I will spent some more time to replace the unmaintained dump1090 fork as soon as possible.
Somewhen in the afternoon of August 21st the stats dropped down and stayed the level until August 27th when I sent back the device as I thought it was broken.
Initially I had the same values when plugging in the new device two days ago. Yesterday I started rolling back the installation and installed the packages step by step until the range dropped again.
