Setting up Feed at my airport, HEF

Howdy,

Two questions about setting up a new feed:

1. I was considering setting up a feed at my airport but I wanted to see if there's a way to find out if there's one already there? I'm at HEF, Manassas, VA.

2. Basically, I'm "off grid" as I'm on a tie down. I would put my receiver on a solar powered storage box I have at the airport next to the plane. So electricity isn't the problem. I have a wireless carrier internet connection / hotspot with T-Mobile that is data capped that I use for the remote security camera. I might be able to run the feed via that hotspot, but is there a way to reduce the data throughput? Alternatively, I might be able to reach the FBO wifi, but it's ~500' away from my plane.

 

Unlikely there is anyone at your airport.

@wiedehopf can explain how to reduce traffic with beast reduce. Turning off MLAT would reduce data as well.

If you can talk to the FBO, we'll send complete hardware if they would mount the antenna, provide power and internet.

 

Thanks for the info on the reduced data feed. I'll give that a try once I can get a hold of a USB Receiver. Amazon is sold out of the Flight Aware one so I'm thinking of getting one of the RadarBox devices, green one, and see how that goes.

While there a number of business at this Washington DC area airport and most of them cater to government projects and like to keep things as anonymous as possible. So the FBO and airport authority aren't interested in hosting a ADS-B receiver. I uploaded a picture of my current tie down storage box.

 

I love it!

 

Howdy,

So I got everything set up at my house and I'm getting ready to bring the device to the airport soon. Two questions on the reduced data feed setting:

1. When I turn MLAT off via the command line will MLAT turn on again next power cycle / reboot?
2. I set the message interval to 4 seconds, to be extra conservative. Is there a way to figure out how much data is sent to the ADSBExchange servers, maybe using the Grafana dashboard with the Pi data showing network throughout? But that's a little course in terms of precision of how many messages are being sent to your server, plus it shows things like my webpage traffic.

P.S. Do you guys find 978 Receiver data to be useful too? I'm worried I'll pickup the TIS-B and FIS-B datalinks and significantly increase my data throughput with that data.

 

I wouldn't set it to 4 seconds .. 2 at most. readsb uses beast reduce so that should be fine.

Turn off mlat:

sudo systemctl stop --now adsbexchange-mlat
sudo systemctl disable --now adsbexchange-mlat

Disable should take care of it, but might as well stop it.

978 is useful, image will pipe UAT into uat2esnt (converts to ADS-B 1090 message) and beast reduce combine it to send to ADSBx.

@wiedehopf probably has some suggestions to further reduce bandwidth.

What's your data cap monthly?

 

Howdy,

So I used the ADSBx Custom Pi image. Simply flashed it to an SD card, configrued the configADSB and WiFi text files. Basically followed your link here: https://www.adsbexchange.com/how-to-feed/adsbx-custom-pi-image/ Nothing more or less. Look at the local IP address and then get the map and dashboards by following the hyperlinks. So I think I have stats installed as part of the default image, or am I mistaken?

In terms of data plan, I have T-Mobile so there's no hard limit to data, just a hard limit to high-speed data. Basically they throttle me to something between 512k and 128 kbps if I go over 2 GBs. But it's not much of an issue for me unless I want to live stream my security video camera, which is not something I do that often. So maybe I'll stick to 2 second intervals with MLAT off and see how much data I use in the first month.

I'm ordering the 978 Radar stick today so I can have both feed options now. We certainly have 978 traffic at the airport and I suspect that you have fewer 978 feeders.

 

Thank for the tips. The UUID is helpful as it alleviates the need to open up a VPN into my now budding wireless device setup at the airport!

I got the 978 Receiver, the redstick from RadarBox, this week and hooked it up to my Pi. I wanted to check that enabling 978 reception is as simple as editing the ADSB-config file to "dump978=yes"? The setup tutorial suggests that I might have to log into the device and enable the sticks individually, but I'm wondering if that might be an old implementation or for somebody not using the ADSBx Custom Pi image as I'm doing?

Last but not least, does the Grafana or any other Dashboard give somekind of indication the 978 receiver is up and running properly? The myip link I know gives the happy face when the feeder is working, but it doesn't breakout (at least from what I can see) if it's a 978 or 1090 feeder.

Thank you. Hope to set up my feeder shortly at the airport and not simply just at my house.

 

The receivers need to be serialized. check forums for instructions on how to do this. I would post a link to a tutorial on FA but form says I am spamming. Once you do this you need to edit a few files and make sure you put in the right serial numbers in the correct place. hers is how I did it and its working. edit sudo nano /boot/adsbx-env comment out the line for single 1090 and un comment the line for 1090/978. then make sure you put the right serieal number in for the 1090 receiver. mine is 00001090 in the file it will say 1090. change to match what you have made yours. then edit sudo nano /etc/default/dump978-fa match the serieal number to what you made the 978 receiver. also set the gain for the 978 here in this file. to check status sudo systemctl status dump978-fa. if you have a green dot next to dump978-fa.service and active (running) is green you are good to go. Do a search on flight aware forms for "How-to Serialize Dongles for ES1090 + UAT978"

 

Additionally I run radar box red and green sticks and their antenna and they work great. I have adsbx on a pi I will be relocating over next to the airport and FA Piaware on another pi over by the airport now. both have radarbox equipment. I would post links but forum will not let me. The FA system picks up the aircraft on the runway. Cannot wait to get the adsbx system over there this weekend.

 

the Piaware would not let me I followed the instructions on the forms here and it crashed. Tried 6 times re-imaged and FA's software would not work. Was sick of fighting it so I just set up 2 pi's no big deal. I actually rather just do it this way. Plan was not to feed many anyway just adsbx and FA. Only reason for feeding FA was when I got into watching aircraft they were the first I came across so i figured I would contribute to them. How ever after seeing adsbx I wanted to contribute here also. I like that it is no hide me crap.

 

thanks, I think I got everything up and running, a green dot next to dump978-fa.

 

I installed Piaware image and tried to add ADSB by script instruction. But for some reason it would just keep crashing. It was almost a month ago. 2? nope there will be 4 and thats no big deal.
photos of FA system I will be adding 2 more antenna and the other pi for adsbx

 

So I'm up and running, seeing way too much traffic