Unfortunately I’ve no photos of the setups at the moment, but here are the descriptions.
Limerick, Ireland: Pi2, RTL-SDR v3 dongle, RTL-SDR triple-filtered ADS-B LNA, self-built 8-element co-linear coaxial antenna. Taped to the inside of an upstairs window in a suburban house.
Getting about 160-180 NM average max range with this setup. Pretty much filling out the heywhatsthat ranges.
Zurich, Switzerland: Pi4 4gb, Airspy Mini, RTL-SDR triple-filtered ADS-B LNA, another self-built 8-element co-linear coaxial antenna, taped pointing downwards along shelving in an attic of a 6-story apartment building.
Getting mid-150’s NM ranges, and still seeing overhead planes. Also filling out the heywhatsthat range plots.
Zurih, Switzerland: (Trial device, will end up in Limerick eventually) Pi3b+, Radarbox outdoor antenna, RTL-SDR triple-filtered ADS-B LNA, set up inside the same attic at the same position as the colinear above, 1 meter higher though.
The performance if this is at best about 10% worse in range and message rate than the colinear, but not bad overall. Certainly lots better than the RTL-SDR dipole kit alone.
The trial setup will be migrated to replace the Pi2 in Limerick, as I suspect a failing SD card (hangs silently every few weeks), plus the Airspy Mini gives significantly better performance than the V3 dongle with everything else being equal.
My setup:
Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+
UUGear powered 7 port USB hub (also powers the Raspberry)
3,2 Adafruit screen
Uputronics filtered pre-amp
Flightaware Pro Stick
TDK Lambda 30W power supply
Everything is fitted on a DIN rail.
The power is adjusted to exactly 5V at the USB ports (which is 5.2V at the power supply).
Antenna is a Diapason MCX from Jetvsion.
I plan an upgrade for a different antenna.
In case you are powering the antenna with the jetvision supplied bias-t:
Remove the uputronics amp from the signal chain and use a non-amplified dongle.
That should provide better results.
The diaspon is an older passive version.
I know that the message >-3db are somewhat high but this gives the highest amount of planes in dump1090. Gain is 28. The drops in the graphs are the result of me rearranging cabling and taking the Pi down several times.
I wasn’t aware there ever was a passive diapason, interesting!
May i out of curiosity know where the top black USB cable goes off to?
Also how does the MCX cable arrive, maybe you can save a bit of adapter loss at the uputronics input.
With an LNA, normally it’s best to just use a non-amplified dongle.
And for ADS-B there is never a reason to use the orange instead of the blue dongle, but i will assume you just had it for some time
I’ve since beefed up the ground connection to the RPi to reduce voltage excursions.
(soldered an extra wire to the USB standoff on the RPi board and connected that to the power supply negative connection)
Also there is a choke/capacitor and resistor/capacitor on the on the connection from the power supply to the LNA to filter some ripple and reduce the voltage to around 3.5 V so the LNA runs a bit cooler (probably not required …).
I can’t really tell you how well my setup is working as i’m heavily limited by terrain.
Furthest i can see is 230 nmi and that’s a very tiny portion of the sky only, 150 nmi is something more typical for half the sky, the other half is less.
But i’m pretty sure it’s working well enough to get pretty much every last bit i can receive in this location.
The black USB is well spotted! I forgot myself ;It is a GPS USB receiver.
I purchased the orange FA dongle before the blue one came out.
The cable from the antenna is fixed into the antenna and has an MCX plug. I purchased the antenna in June 2015 and has been up on the roof ever since. Because I ordered a new antenna we which should arrive in January, I do not plan to make any upgrades for the antenna cabling.
A10 sounds like a 10 segment colinear antenna. You really can’t go wrong with that given that the antenna is carefully constructed / tuned.
I’m sure you can understand i’m somewhat envious of your neat cables
Probably you’ll have some LMR 400 in your future as well with the new antenna!
On the other hand i don’t really frequent the attic, so it’s out of sight.
The specialist antenna mounting system on the other hand is something which i might improve at some point.
But it’s held up surprisingly well and without the telephoto lense, it really doesn’t catch the eye.
Now that Christmas is over i removed the “Christstollen”-Box and put the Raspi including the stick into a wooden box which i’ve taken from our home decoration.
I am still concerned once my wife detects that it’s missing
Seriously i removed it due to the fact that the WiFi signal turned to weak based on the metal case. Seem to be that the Raspi 4 is more sensitive than the 3B.
Didn’t take a picture, i think everybody knows how a wooden box looks like
Homebuilt 8 segment collinear. First one I made and the only one I ever made that works properly. Survived 2 or 3 hurricanes but will be offline very soon due to selling the home to which it is attached. I’ve already started removing some of the mounting and wire cable ties.
For sure its coming off that house. But one thing I learned my having it there is you can add every gadget known to man but nothing beats a great location for ADS-B. And that was a great location.
It will come home to a location that is badly challenged by trees and terrain
I have a great location and a great height, but restricted to be totally indoors.
Almost 180 deg out of 360 are blocked by my own building, and whatever signal beats all this, a large part of it gets absorbed by the walls.
And as if all this was not enough, there are antennas of many Cell Phone Compnies on the roof of my as well as adjacent buildings
I live in an apartment with no balcony and not permitted to install anything on roof, outer wall, or even projecting out of window. See below how I had to install my antennas:
;It is a GPS USB receiver.
