My Airsquitter finally made it to it’s new home. Moved to the other balcony, got him a cosy home in a more professional box.
In case somebody is asking: The orange cable is regular power, but for outdoor use. The power jack is on the opposite side, so i needed to put 5 meter to it.
The socket where the Airspy stands is from an external hard drive case. Fits perfect!
And my wife get’s her wooden box back 
Wow, it is looking great. Well done. Guess will order one for myself, so you can start a production line 
No thanks
It turned out during the build that i am not a gifted do-it-yourselfer. 
What about the loss of the combiner, I’m currently trying different models for the lowest loss of signal strength.
Havent measured it. It’s not a combiner for two different antennas of same type
This combiner is taking the seperate GPS and ADS-B Signals, because the Airsquitter does have a combined input for both.
it is required if you are using an additional LNA and/or an antenna without built-in GPS (like the Jetvision A3
Jetvision did not provide details about the loss, but i don’t see any significant change.
Downtime documented
What i have forgotten to mention: I was able to leave the antenna at its original place one floor above. Length of cable fits perfectly to have the feeder downstairs.
New installation using a Pi4 and ADSB Exchange dongle. Seems ok. Getting hits ranging from 160 - 200 nm out. This is my first exterior antenna with this setup.
Can you mount the antenna further up the tower?
Could I? Yes, but there is a lot more aluminum above it.
Curious as to why you put everything on a copper sheet.
Grounding, shielding, or heat sink? Or all of the above.
Jim,
I have the copper for both heat and RFI suppression plus when the lightning strike comes it helps dissipate the energy. I have a roll of this copper left over from my radio tower project so I use it on most of my SDR radios.
As for RFI my SatNOGs VHF receiver was getting hammered by the NOAA 162MHz station up the hill. The passband filter helped but the power and USB cables were carrying a good bit of the unwanted signal.
My grounding experience comes from design/build and installation of datacenters and cable head ends all over the country so I followed those installation standards. Lots of copper and thoughtful design work keeps the RFI at bay.
@JohnTrolinger
Ok thanks – and probably the ferrite beads help reduce interference from the USB. I’m always looking for ways of improving performance without spending a lot of bucks.
All my raspberry computers are sat on a shelf in my ‘computer room’ as my wife calls it. It can get quite warm in there in the summer as it is on the south side of the house.
The 4 series are in FLIRC cases because they were overheating and throttling but the 3 series ones were in the stock plastic because they seemed to be OK.
However, I was looking at them the other day and noticed that a few of the cases on the older ones had discolored due to the warmth so maybe they weren’t OK after all.
I replaced the remaining plastic cases with FLIRC ones and was shocked by what a difference they make.
No idea if this will improve throughout etc., of course.
Hi all!
My current fledgling setup is as follows:
ultrafeeder Docker container from SDR Enthusiasts feeding ADS-B and MLAT to a number of sites including FlightAware.The whole thing lives in my loft in South West England. At this stage there’s no filters nor amplifiers. Range seems to top out into the low 200nm in the North-West direction. During busy periods I’m looking at ~1.5k messages/second, with ~100 aircraft. Gain is set using autogain bundled with the Docker container (I think it’s from @wiedehopf) and is constantly at 49.6.
Compute wise the CPU utilisation is a roughly continuous 10%, with 280MB RAM used.
Nice to meet you all!
