tl;dr: I switched from a nooelec nesdr mini usb tuner with the default little magnetic base antenna to an RTL-SDR v4 tuner with its included telescoping antennas, and I’ve lost all ADS-B packets - nothing is coming in.
sorry if these are silly questions, I’m only a beginner when it comes to this & ham radio. I understand basic concepts of RF but am not sure how to troubleshoot things.
I reviewed many discussions about transitioning from one dongle to another, and I don’t think my raspberry pi is having any issue detecting the new RTL-SDR dongle; querying the 1090-fa status shows ‘Found Rafael Micro R2828D tuner’ / ‘rtlsdr: tuner gain set to about 58.6 dB’ etc.
rtl_test also reports that the dongle tuner is detected and functioning.
I’ve connected the RTL to its bundled dipole antenna base and tried the extendable antennas. I see in this thread that these aren’t optimally tuned to 1090 mhz which makes sense… but is there any way to confirm that the antenna is the only issue here? (I don’t have an adapter on hand to try my old nooelec’s antenna with the RTL-SDR) Is it expected to receive absolutely nothing using the dipole antenna?
You can see the transition from the nooelec to RTL around 20:40 in my charts:
