Greetings. I’ve been feeding FlightAware for years now, but recently I’m having some strange issues. I changed out the actual Raspberry Pi hardware as the old one was starting to fail, and now the number of planes reported is much lower than it was. Both by count and distance. I would regularly get 200mile reports, sometimes even 250 mile reports. I’m lucky to get anything over 120miles.
I’m looking for some tips on how to determine if I either have a bad FlightAware stick, poorly tuned setup, or just broken setup.
I did notice that my dump978-fa won’t start, but I’m reading that I might need two dongles and two antennas, does that seem right? Thanks!
It would help to know more about your hardware setup, but you could try the following:
Depending on the Pi you are using, it may have both USB 2.0 and USB 3.0. Alternately, one or more of the ports could be having problems. Depending on a number of factors, swapping the USB port that the SDR dongle is connected to could help.
If you have other devices on USB on this Pi, make sure they’re all on either USB 2.0 or USB 3.0, not both, since the RPi seems to have trouble with the timing sequence between the two when running ADS-B.
Your new RPi may generate more RF interference than the previous Pi. If you don’t have one already, try using a USB extension cable to separate the SDR dongle from the Pi. Even 6 inches may do a lot.
Your new setup may actually be getting better reception than before! Try adjusting gain up or down to optimize it.
Generally, yes, you’ll need a second dongle for UAT-978 reception, but again we’d need to know more about your hardware setup to be certain.
I should have advised you to install Graphs 1090 so you could see the the detail of what’s going on and tell the difference between the before an after.
Let us know if you continue to see improvement or if new problems arise!
