You knew i’d have to open the picture in a new tab and read the label, didn’t you?
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i would have done something more funny on it.
e.g. “Property of the Federal Bureau of Investigation”
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Need to become friends with your 3rd story neighbor 
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I took this ‘beauty shot’ of my receiver the week after it went up. It was a chilly day with a cloudless blue sky, a typical late autumn morning.
You can see the Jetvision aerial mounted in the centre of the Hexbeam, the aerial is at 44ft AGL. The receiver itself is in the box mounted just below the top of the mast and consists of a Pi4, Airspy Mini, bias-tee injector and RTL-SDR-LNA. There’s 5.5m of Hyperflex 10 coax between the aerial and the receiver box.
The whole thing is fed with PoE up via CAT6 cable and using the official Raspberry Pi PoE HAT.
The Hexbeam covers 6m through 20m plus 40m on the amateur bands and I can transmit using full power on all bands with no ill effect to the receiver. I’m uploading to FA, FR24, Planefinder, Opensky, RB24 and (via VRS) ADSBHub.
I love this picture because it shows it off so well and if you look closely, you can see an airplane in the distance 
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My receiver, with an LCD Touch-screen daughterboard. Love that I can view the status at a glance without having to hook up a full-size monitor.
There’s a 26-inch standard-issue antenna on my garage roof. The ground plane is the entire roof, since it’s all-metal. I’m picking up aircraft at 250 miles away.
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I’m listening for Mark Watney 
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Now I want a setup like this also!
Excellent, what aerial will you be using?
For this i am not yet sure.
Right now i am planning to replace my Raspi 3B with this one and use the 3B into the other direction where the first one is a bit blocked by the roof itself.
I will either use then a DIY antenna or get another one, depends if i plan the second setup also outdoor/indoor
EDIT: Active Armor Case
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Nice case / heatsink.
Does it make contact with the processor?
yes,
there are three thermal pads in the box of the case. These are for
CPU
RAM
USB Controller
The upper part of the case has three ‘humps’ which fit perfect to the layout, these have the contact to the thermal pads
Fans are quiet, you can hear them only if you’re close to it. There’s an option getting them rotating slower also by using different pins. but this might be required for operation in bedrooms only.
Device is running now indoor since almost two hours, temperature stable. But it also has nothing to do at the moment except running Piaware/dump1090
Sure, but it was just five bucks more and i am planning to have other services running on it as well later.
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Oh that makes it a no-brainer! It’s £10 more to go from 2Gb to 4Gb here.
Memory can be replaced only by more memory.
I wouldn’t have considered it as “expensive” if it would have been 10 more. It’s still cheap.
I am still impressed what can be done with a device for less than 100 Euro compared to these overpriced devices many are using.
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@keithma I took this ‘beauty shot’ of my receiver the week after it went up.
That is a great shot. Really nice setup you’ve got there.
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Congrats on the upgrade. The pi4 is my first pi ever but i already know what it’s capable of. When you go to run plots.sh, you’ll have all your images in under a minute (for full 24 hour run averaging 350,000 data points).
First update from my swapped devices:
- The Raspi 4 took over the place of the previous Raspi 3, this moved to a different position. I also exchanged the (identical) FA sticks.
- Antenna remain on the same place, also connectors are used, Stick is connected to a USB 3.0 slot
- The Raspi 4 creates a higher number of messages > -3dBFS if the gain level is set to the same value as on the 3B
- The range has been increased by 10-15 NM
- The view for this setup is “closer” to 360° than the previous one. I’m getting now aircraft which were blocked before by the roof construction
- Device is now in my “christmas edition” box. WiFi signal is weaker than before, obviously caused by the additional fan driven case i am using. Needed to bring the WiFi repeater closer to the Raspi
- Operating temperature tonight went down to 30° with an outside temp of 0°. So far the armor case works pretty well.
to be continued…
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Very nice. I actually pick up more aircraft behind my building than I do facing the tree line with mine. I’ve also done away with the USB extension cable, added the LNA to the FA Pro Stick Plus and added the new FA antenna and noticed a significant increase in daily number of aircraft seen. It went from ~1,200 to between ~2,600 and ~3,200.
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