And it is apparent that about 1/3 of the positions you report are to your North West and less than 40NM. Is this the ground traffic you mentioned?
I was being a bit facetious. There are definitely plenty of lorries driving around the SFO airport. They show up with Flight number OPS23 or some other number at altitude GROUND. At busy times there are up to 5 or so but at those times I have 200 planes on my local radar. The point is, that the ground operations lorries do count towards positions locally. Not sure they get uploaded though to FA.
@jonhawkes2030
I would not need a separate bias tee then, and put the uputronics up the mast near the antenna and power directly from the Airspy? Interesting. Then I would need to find a pole mount box to fit the uputronics.
If you want to get rid of the ground traffic, set the Filter by Altitude to 1 and click on the Filter button and that should remove aircraft and vehicles showing Altitude of Ground. (I don’t see anything on the ground here so I can’t test it ).
S
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You should ideally install any preamp as close as possible to the antenna, to have the best SNR.
I see that you are not raised in US, we call those trucks.
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Yes. I have done that for one of my uat978 feeds. The amp is not weather proof so will need a good box on the mast.
The amp is not weather proof so will need a good box on the mast.
I will find a box. Uputronics have one in their store.
and it is apparent that about 1/3 of the positions you report are to your North West and less than 40NM. Is this the ground traffic you mentioned?
My hypothesis is that I see flights from Asia on the way to SoCal that my neighbors don’t see. These planes are just passing by the SF Bay Area usually out over the Pacific ocean.
Those many positions could be TIS-B positions of all the VFR traffic around SFO he might not receive directly.
Or something along those lines.
Is the Airspy Mini a plug-n-play replacement for the orange/blue FA dongles?
No. It has no amplifier/LNA.
(The airspy is good but to reach its potential you will need an LNA)
But it’s not supported directly by dump1090-fa.
Configuration isn’t that complicated though: HOWTO: Airspy mini and Airspy R2: Piaware / dump1090-fa configuration
While i’m using it with the rtl-sdr blog LNA via the internal bias tee and it’s working fine, the internal bias tee is not rated for enough current for that LNA.
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For the new site I’m building I’m having the antenna / dongle / Rpi 3+ all directly connected-no cables or coax. I have the room for an LNA still in my project box.
Getting that mounted correctly and waterproof so wind vibrations won’t make water come in, not sure if that is really worth it.
I would rather use a quality 1m cable but good luck 
If you use an external LNA, cable between the LNA and dongle is really no factor signal quality wise.
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Does the Airspy R2 have enough current in the bias tee to have the Uputronics LNA placed on the mast 5 meters cable away? From @jonhawkes2030 I got the impressionist that it will work.
Also, to you other point about the cable quality between LNA and Airpsy. Do I read that as: no need to get LMR 400 but something of lower quality will work as well?
Either Airspy model will be fine with Uputronics amp.
According to the data sheet the Uputronics uses 56 mA which should be fine for the Airspy.
Also Uputronics claims on their product page that they are compatible with the Airspy bias-tee.
Don’t think the R2 has a bias-tee that differs from the mini, the base layout of both devices is the same, the R2 mainly has more features and a clock input.
I mean i would probably just get a CFD200 or LMR200 cable like this one (https://www.amazon.com/Delock-Antenna-Cable-Plug-CFD200/dp/B00A8FUX40)
or this:
(https://www.amazon.com/Lmr200-Low-Loss-Cable-Female-Connector/dp/B01M11N5CG)
If you have RG6 or RG8 im sure it will also work fine.
Going all out with really high quality cable is really unnecessary in my opinion as the signal is a lot stronger coming out of the LNA.
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Going all out with really high quality cable is really unnecessary in my opinion as the signal is a lot stronger coming out of the LNA.
Thanks. You just saved me some money. I am in the process of getting the pieces together to mount the LNA on the mast. It will be weeks before it is done.
If you get the airspy mini, i got the impression it gets pretty hot.
Putting on some cheap adhesive heatsinks is easy and while it might survive just fine being hot, it doesn’t hurt putting on heatsinks
(I got a large bag so i had plenty for all the chips i could find on the RPi)
(Something like this https://www.amazon.com/Raspberry-Heatsink-Lanpu-Performance-conductive/dp/B07D15MDXH)
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If only the LNA is outside, the installation is much simplified. The Airspy/Pi3+ can be placed in a conditioned environment, much easier to deal with heat/moisture.
Yeah i’m not sure how the airspy mini would do in an outside enclosure.
The RPi has much more CPU load with an airspy as a receiver, it will get hotter than usual.
Overall with an LNA i don’t see the benefit of making all that work in regards to thermal management.
As Sonic said it’s much easier to only place the LNA in the outside box.
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I just did another upgrade to my piaware. 1st upgrade 2 years ago was my SDR dongle with R820T chip got replaced with an SDR dongle with the R820T2 chip and added another SDR dongle with the R820T2 chip. The R820T2 does very well at handling UAT 978 MHz. I was using the AntennaCraft ST2 for the primary dongle, but moved it to the second dongle for UAT.
This week, I changed my cabling from RG6 to RG11 and installed the new Flightaware UAT 978 MHz antenna for the 2nd dongle. Also installed the new Flightaware ADS-B and UAT (1090 + 978 MHz) band pass filter to both dongles.
Whole lot better coverage now for my piaware.
My piaware feeds both ADS-B/Mode-S and UAT and runs on a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+.
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… and that is where I ended up. The LNA is up the mast 14 coaxial cable inches from the antenna (box and instructions at https://ava.upuaut.net/?p=927). The Airspy is in the cool garage.
In the new setup, after running for a week, I am pleasantly surprised that I got a handful of extra planes and a good number of extra positions. Extra positions in directions that I did not see before, and farther out.
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