Moving it outside from the same spot inside behind the wall gained me ~10% more planes/messages, and 10-15 miles of range. I will try to push it a half way above the gutters next week when it gets a bit warmer here. Maybe it will make some difference since so many obstacles around in many directions.
Antenna is FA, running with a sat LNB , powered by an injector from 15v source. Height is just above the top of my house, the aluminum pole is 2 meters
Location of RPi and SDR stick is temporary, as i need to find a solution to tuck everything in that box or consider moving everything outside in a IP68 box.
Maybe six months after ordering, my Pi Compute Module 4 finally arrived in April. Initially I planned to use that for an air outdoor quality sensor, but I decided I wanted the Pi 4 form factor for that. So this week I swapped out my ADSB station’s Pi 4 and put in the CM4. All is well, and all is the same in terms of performance.
Constant reported voltage over POE did increase from .8500V to .8700V with the Waveshare POE board vs Pi4+POE Hat, but everything is still perfectly powered. Confirmed with extended Sysbench 4-thread stress benchmarks during peak ADSB traffic hours.
The orange pro stick + Uputronics USB powered LNA is for UAT. The Airspy R2 + bias tee powered RTL-SDR BLOG 1090 MHZ ADS-B LNA is for 1090 tracking. So it’s all one station feed.
For my location, the RTL-SDR bias tee LNA slightly outperforms the 1090 USB powered Uputronics for message rates on the Airspy.
Up until December, I had an extension cord with power strip in a utility box powering the 978 LNA and case fan on their own USB power adapters, and the orange pro stick through a separately powered USB hub. Once I updated my home network over the holidays, I decided to run POE ethernet to the station. I was thrilled that all the peripherals could get adequate power over POE.
In fact, it seems like there’s no change to performance no matter how I do it. After lots of various antenna and LNA purchases and various tests and tweaks through much of 2020, I’m at the point now that nothing changes when I try to tweak things. I think I have maximized my station for its current antennas positioning. Only thing left to do might be to chop down the tall forest surrounding me.
Antenna is currently an Airnav with the fixed 10m coax on a 2m pole, although this will shortly be changing to a Jetvision A3 with 10m LMR400 coax on a 3m pole.
It’s an ‘organised mess’; not too dissimilar to my hair style
Once I’ve stopped experimenting, I’ll come up with a tidy solution, but at the moment there’s no point in keeping it neat.
Only one neighbour has ever noticed and commented on them, and it turns out he’s an aircraft enthusiast and subscribes to FR24’s gold membership, so he was quite impressed.
I tried using my radio scanner’s discone antenna for ADS-B, just for the fun of it, but it resulted in about 50% drop in aircraft
cable/zip ties. I have them everywhere! Great for every hobby.