Mele Kalikimaka all! New feeder says Aloha! I'm running the ADSB Exchange Pi4 Kit package on 15' of LMR-400 mounted on my roof mast at 35' AGL, 140' AMSL from about 1 week ago. Before that, it was feeding from my indoor workbench for 2 weeks while I messed with stuff. Sadly, I'm in a valley with a 2500' mountain range about 4 miles from here that blocks me from seeing PHNL and blocks ground coverage of other airfields. None the less, I'm very happy to feed and I still see interesting stuff locally (drones, aerobatic pilots, various public safety and other stuff I could not previously identify) and really appreciate this community. I do have a 400' AMSL hill behind me, and my next experiment will be to remote the whole package up there with solar / battery power and a 5 GHz wireless bridge back to the mothership. I'm also going to enlist a friend who lives in a high rise in HNL to host another feeder that will cover a lot of area and two airfields. Any advice on low power ethernet links would be appreciated. (not Ubiquity please). Best, Kuunanet
Welcome Kuunanet, This is a fascinating hobby as it takes in computing, programming, radio as well as aircraft. You'll get much advice and the fun is experimenting. Antenna is usually the main issue. I am close to London Heathrow so receive plenty of data with just an indoor aerial on my windowsill. I have experimented with a portable unit in my car whilst out driving but with that the mlat cannot be used as location changes. The remote idea is interesting, Pi 4 - haven't got one but understand it consumes fair bit of power, Pi Zero could be an option for remote unit. Two versions of the zero now, a quad core unit and the original single core unit. I run the latter which only consumes 400mA which includes the ads-b tuner. It would struggle if extra programs running displaying graphs etc so the quad Zero may be a better option but new device so not too many comments about it yet. Geoff
Yeah the pi zero 2 w would certainly be a good choice due to reduced power usage. > The idle power draw of the Zero 2 is similar to the Zero W (about 0,7 W). Under load, however, it might go up to 3 Watts. https://picockpit.com/raspberry-pi/...Zero 2 W power usage,draw about 1.7 Watts max. https://hackaday.com/2021/11/01/the-pi-zero-2-w-is-the-most-efficient-pi/ The second link shows that when you stress the pi zero 2 w, it's using quite a bit more power than the old pi zero. The old pi zero is quite anemic though .... and if you're gonna need a wifi link anyhow ... the small difference in wattage might not matter.
Aloha Geoff and wiedehopf ! Thanks for the advice on power consumption. I plan on remoting my entire Pi4 dual tuner rig up the hill behind me. I've used bridged mode WiFi routers in the past for deployment of instrument packages for my real job, as well as cheap low speed data services on cell carriers as a "last mile connection", (sorry, kilometers for some out there.) I have enough spare solar panels and deep cycle AGM SLA batteries to provide 15 watts/ Hr that will run 2 -3 days without much sun. That condition is rare here and this hobby is not mission critical. I might try the bridged WiFi again, but most access points and routers these days do not support bridge mode without extensive firmware hacking. I've also looked at long range POE Cat5E and gigabit / Power coax solutions which I have used in gigabit grade surveillance camera systems. These solutions work great but are $$$$. The system I used powers 16 cameras (4 watts each) with gigabit connections over a 3000' run of Cat 5E, and the 4 four port nodes can be placed anywhere along 3000" cable run in daisy link fashion. They also make single link versions that deliver gigabit with POE++ that go to nearly 2 miles. My experiences with Ubiquity PTP and PTMP links has been poor. Crap stuff that fails. Anyhow, the current plan is to remote it all with a 100 W solar panel, 55Ah SLA battery and sealed Sunsaver charge controller, with the ADSBX kit I have in a sealed Pelican case. The radio or wired link is my stumbling point. The hill behind me is vacant, un-walked on so I could with some effort and expense simply throw outdoor wire in the ground.
Some router with openWRT would be my first try. https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/network/wifi/relay_configuration Maybe a pair of commodity routers with one as a host, one as a client doing the bridging. Both with a parabolic wifi dish of some kind? But i don't know what you consider "too much hacking".
Actually using NAT and port forwarding to reach the pi going backwards via the NAT seems like the much simpler / more reliable solution: https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/network/wifi/relay_configuration#using_nat Otherwise you could use some commercial function like Asus Mesh? Just make one of them a "slave router" or however that works and connect a parabolic dish to one of their antenna ports each. You should then be able to use wifi on the pi an it should just act like the LAN you connect the other router to. But i haven't tried any of that.
A lot of commodity D-Link routers used to offer bridge mode as a standard feature setting. Somewhere around here I still have some 11 dbi paddle antennas that I ssed with long dead D-Link routers as a bridge system. Time to google and clean up the junk boxes and find those antennas. New subject: after powering down the PI4 to add a POE extractor for power, I just noticed I can't see the graphs page on the /local connection. All the other pages on /local are still there and working. Seen that one before?
I just found this and because I can add a better antenna and it supports Raspian, I thought I might try this, and then upgrade the antenna on one of my access points.
Sorry, forgot the Amazon link. for the device references above. SEE: Amazon.com: Panda Wireless PAU06 300Mbps Wireless N USB Adapter - w/High Gain Antenna - Win XP/Vista/7/8/10, Mint, Ubuntu, MX Linux, Manjaro, Fedora, Centos, Kali Linux and Raspbian : Electronics
Can't see the graphs .... be more specific which graphs and just the data is gone or the page? If you don't shut down last 24h of graph data isn't saved to disk ... saves to disk every 24h.
Blimey, my Zero sitting on my window sill with a stock indoor antenna attached to a tin can seems a bit ordinary now I'll be interested to see how the Zeros work out for you and look forward to some updates. Geoff
Yeah that sounds like data corruption if anything. You could check F12 dev console in the browser .... what kind of page you get of if there are errors on the console.
The console shows a blank page. I can see the code in the console browser on all the other /local pages.... Time to re-image the SD card perhaps?
You can just update / reinstall graphs1090 (same thing) and it'll probably work. https://github.com/wiedehopf/graphs1090#graphs1090 But it shows there is something wrong ...
Mahalo Sir! that did the trick. The reason I wanted to look at the graphs was to check the noise floor on RX signal levels to see if the use of a supposed Rasberry Pi compatible POE extractor changed the noise floor as compared to the PS shipped with the ADSBEchange kit I bought from Amazon: Amazon.com: UCTRONICS PoE Splitter USB-C 5V - Active PoE to USB-C Adapter, IEEE 802.3af Compliant for Raspberry Pi 4, Google WiFi, Security Cameras, and More : Electronics It looks like the noise floor went up by about 2 dB. That could be because the Pi and POE extractor are just velcroed to a wall in a closet up high. Ill try separating the Pi and POE and adding chokes next and will let all know. Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to Alll!
UPDATE: The PoE extractor works fine. I just had to separate it about 6" from the ADSBX kit. Noise floor dropped back to the lowest value observed to date. Happy New Year All!
