Hey all, First time poster, long time lurker, but for some background I'm a lapsed ham radio operator, lifelong nerd, computer hacker in the non-mass media terminology, and recovering FR24/FA feeder (tried reading their forums and holy sh*t I'm pretty sure if you were to compromise their data you'd find 99% aol email addresses!). Anyway....been feeding since the days when you had to roll your own, got lazy when the kids were born, updated my setup slightly when I moved from metro Atlanta to coastal Florida, and finally to a 3B+ when a lightning strike at neighbor's house next door traveled across coax, through my modem, across my ethernet network and took out 3 ports on my router, an 8-port switch, my Drobo (drives and files safe), my color laser multifunction (ouch...that one was $$$), an AIS receiver I host, a Linux sandbox built from random parts, and 2 RasPis (PiHole and my ADSB box). I had been meaning to switch over to the ADSBx build because of the lower overhead, the Grafana interface, and what I perceived to be much more knowledgeable userbase based on the forums. Oh, I'm also well-known for providing way too much background when introducing myself on forums/Discourse, so there's that too. So it has come time to do a little home remodeling and with it, some network reconfiguring. The AIS aggregator was nice enough to send me the latest and greatest model of their receiver which is just a 3B+ inside a fancy case (whereas the previous one was a gargantuan beast with dual BNC connectors on the back and Ethernet or serial were the only connectivity options) so I now have WiFi capability on the 2 tracking devices attached to the antennae that my wife hates attached to the house and I no longer need the hole knocked in the wall from the garage to the office where my "NOC" is. My plan is to move both of those devices to a shelf in the garage so I can patch those holes and regain a corner of that room and the bonus is that I will be able to cut about 15 feet off of the antenna feed line out of the equation bringing the total down to approx 6 feet. Probably wasn't a significant amount of noise to begin with, but hey, I'm chalking it up as a victory regardless. In their new space, they will literally be separated from the WiFi router by only 2 sheets of drywall, so I'm not worried about signal loss in that regard. Crap! My tangents again...sorry! Because I constantly need to be entertained and coding and compiling (and the associated errors, swearing, re-coding, and re-compiling) are the only things that hold my attention for more than 10 minutes, I think I'm going to use a portion of my holiday break from work to add 978MHz into the mix in my station. There are 3 pretty large flight schools within 65nm from me and I know I'm not getting all I can with with 1090. So I still have my old Prostick lying around from back in the day before the Prostick+ came out, I just haven't done anything with it. I have the FA 1090 antenna on my roof on the same mount as my AIS antenna about 20' off the ground. I live 2000' from the Atlantic with a clear sightlines east and I can routinely pick up readable signals as far away as Savannah, the Bahamas, and the Keys and occasionally pick up Europe-Mexico traffic pinging well over the Gulf of Mexico when conditions allow. My plan is to pick up an antenna tuned to 978 and diplex it to one of my current feed lines as I'm pretty sure my wife will kill me if I cut one more hole in the house. Would I be better off diplexing with the 1090 antenna or the AIS (161.975MHz & 162.025MHZ) or would I be better off with a more tuned diplexer even though 978 and 1090 are rather close on the spectrum? I don't plan on amplifying anything initially as I want to see how shortening my feed lines changes things, but I may need a filter as my AIS has been pisspoor lately. Thanks and sorry for the novel. -CGE
FA 1090 antenna blocks 978, so they can sell you another 978 antenna. ADSBx designed a 1090/978 for $35. https://store.adsbexchange.com/collections/frontpage/products/5-5dbi-1090-978-antenna 978 isn't hard to setup, though FA purposely made it difficult to get the output out to anyone but PiAware. https://www.adsbexchange.com/downloads/adsbx-v1.28vlan.zip Get this running on a Pi. You'll need to set serial of each SDR appropriately. Plug one in, then set serial. Unplug. Put the other one in and set serial. etc etc. rtl_eeprom -s 1090 rtl_eeprom -s 978 Set UAT to yes in adsb-config.txt - along with all other appropriate configs. Then let me know and I can push the latest 978 scripts.
You are a lifesaver, sir! Antenna just ordered. Already running the 1.28vlan image but will reconfigure when the antenna arrives. Orange stick should arrive this weekend but if the FA 1090 antenna is purposely crippled from the factory, I'll just wait. Thanks again!
So I had some other projects to get out of the way, but as of today the antenna is up and the Pi running with both dongles attached and re-serialed with 1090 as device 0 and 978 for device 1. config.txt has been updated as well. Anything else I need to do on my end?
https://github.com/adsbxchange/adsbexchange-stats Step 2 ONLY. Then you can email a screenshot of https://adsbexchange.com/myip/ to me ... [email protected] dot com
