I am an enthusiastic Pi user for various projects, Linux is my main OS. Love aircraft but purely as an observer or traveller.
As for feeding ADSB sites I am curious as to reasons we choose some and not others.
I personally started and have stayed with the PiAware system. Main reason for preferring them over FR24 was I found the forum more welcoming and friendly, appreciate many post in both but I tend to ask any questions here.
Also feed FR24 as their web page is brilliant, happy to support, feed and benefit from the extra functions on the site.
ADSB-Exchange Iāve seen some criticism, negative opinions on the fact it is unfiltered. Personally I am unsure about this, is it a security issue? I have no real idea, guessing if it was a security issue it would have been stopped somehow.
ADSB-Hub I donāt fully understand if this is similar to ADSB-Exchange or not, the former offers an image for viewing collected data, the latter does not appear to.
Smart speakers have apps that will verbally announce certain close by aircraft data, a novelty indeed but not sure how useful this is.
Iām sure there are numerous other ADSB Data sites and would be interested to know as to why you maybe choose to feed some over others.
Flightaware
I have bought the FA dongles and antennas and registered the first site 3 years ago.
Forum is pretty helpfull and it enables me to get the most out of the hardware also thanks to the forums members and their assistance
FR24
I feed them in order to use the FR24 business grade app when on the road
I donāt have a high regard of the forums there. Lots of whining when something breaks and i donāt like their interface as it is now.
ADSB exchange
I feed them due to the fact that they are unfilterd indeed, most others block out the military aircraft and the governmental aircraft.
Being a pilot myself Iād like to have the the total overview of what is flying around my house and itās a way to give back to the community as well.
RadarBox24: Mainly because I started with their RadarBox back in 2008 and I liked their software despite a few longstanding issues including butting heads with Andre over the years!
FR24: As I always preferred, paid for & used their iOS App above all others I wanted to give something back.
FA: Mainly because I seem to find myself frequenting this forum to ask questions so again wanted to give something back.
ADSB Exchange: My longstanding interest in Military (aka unfiltered) and because I use an app called OpenADSB that uses ADSBx as their data source.
Sites I donāt feed but could be persuaded especially if my reasoning is out of order;
OpenSky Network: Seems to have a dead community so not sure if it is supported or not?
PlaneFinder: Used to feed these back in the early days but they seemed lazy and werenāt very helpful this time round.
PlanePlotter: Always liked Bev & Co and used to feed them also back in the day but donāt see any iOS app?
ADSB Hub: No reason why I shouldnāt become a feeder other than I never got round to it!
Another reason I donāt feed more sites is because I am not an expert in Piās and I worry that adding another feed will upset what has been a very reliable, solid, stable platform requiring minimal maintenance although my experience to date with the help & support of you guys in here and who frequent a couple of other related forums tends to lay that irrational fear of mine to bed!
I would be interested to hear opinions as to my train of thought on the above reasoning or indeed of other sites that I havenāt mentioned that I might consider for feeding.
I am still feeding this site, because it does have some nice stats and charts. But i agree, the community is not well maintained.
The data is still in use for their project, but they obviously does not have that much interest in supporting the feeders
Depending on how you access your Pi system it should be quite easy to make a backup of a working stable system then if you add anything and it goes wrong just revert to saved copy.
Probably easiest way is to poweroff the Pi, remove microSD card and backup however convenient. There are ways of backing up a working system but with temp and cache files can cause problems. Because of the generally small size of MicroSD cards copying is usually quick.
I do tend to keep a few small capacity cards for Pi devices running this software although the Pi can be run from an external disk (All models but Pi 4 easiest) but probably bit pointless for ADS-B requirements.
FA - I started with piaware, use their software and enjoy the discussion group.
ADSBexchange - because it is unfiltered. There is no security risk to my Pi that I have found, nor is there a security risk to an aircraft because, well, if you wanted to shoot something youād be better off just looking up!
FR24 - their included business account has a neat app where you can point your phone at an aircraft and the app will identify it for you.
Actually it is because of my fear of losing a perfectly working system that I keep an identical SanDisk Extreme Pro 32GB MicroSD Card permanently plugged into a SanDisk USB3 adaptor into one of the USB3 ports on the Pi 4 and before any updates/changes etc. logon using RDP and use SDCard Copier on the Pi to clone a working copy of the boot card.
I do occasionally shutdown the Pi and swap the cards round to verify the cloned card does actually work as a disaster recovery measure and spread the load across both cards.
I wait about a week between updating the Pi just to make sure it is running without issues before I clone the card and immediately after cloning I update the software on the original card which means if anything goes wrong during the update I can quickly switch cards around and I am back to exactly where I was before attempting the update/install.
It takes less than 7 minutes to logon, run SDCard Copier and clone the card and seems to work well for me.
One of the Piās also acts as a āhot spareā in case of any hardware issue which means I can just swap in the required card from the faulty Pi and Iām back in business in no time at all.
The card in the hot spare contains a customised Buster OS which is all setup, up to date and contains all of those utilities & configs so if I buy another Pi I just use the spare card to plug into that and Iām all good to go with a fully patched, fully configured Pi setup.
Not sure if you are aware but if you are logged in to Flightaware web page and go on to the adsb stats section - at the end of the URL will be your username.
If you delete your username and enter any other users (case sensitive) youāll see their stats.
FlightRadar24, was where I started out on this journey and we use their app on our mobile phones (including a Windows phone, which I hope never need reinstalling as it is unsupported now) because the missus prefers it. Surprisingly perhaps, it was actually my wife that got me interested in this hobby.
ADSB Exchange was the second one I used and I still feed because it is unfiltered and we quite like being able to look up military planes when we see them.
FlightAware was the third aggregator I discovered and IMHO, has the friendliest and most helpful people on the forum and support. Why wouldnāt you want to share your data with them?
RadarBox and Plane Finder because they have USPs that can be useful on occasion.
Haha, you will note that I said the people on the forum were great. As for the the forum software, not so much, although I donāt think it is as bad as some I frequent.
