I just started feeding and I want to be able to save and visualize the data my receiver collects. Preferably in 3D, but a 2D map with altitude range rings is fine too. Mainly because I'm curious about what my coverage "space" looks like. Is there a simple way to do this that does not require deep, advanced knowledge of Linux, coding and suchlike? A step-by-step tutorial? Perhaps in the form of a program that collects and saves the received data on the SD card every few minutes, combined with a Windows (yes, I want to see it on my real computer - the RPi is used headless) program to visualize the data, on a map background. I've tried to find it, but nothing has come up in my searches. Surely, I can't be the first and only one to want this?
Writing to SD will wreck it. Google. There's plenty of projects ... https://github.com/JorgeGT/PlotRTL1090
Yeah, I found that a while back, but it's for Matlab, which is extremely expensive (a license will set me back equal to the cost of 20 complete Rpi+SDR setups!), so that's not really an option. I doubt that writing/overwriting a small text file every five minutes or so would wreck an SD card. It's only one data point per degree of arc per altitude range, so for a resolution of 1000 ft in altitude, you'd end up with 16 200 data points from ground level to FL450. Per data point, all you need (for plain text) is two bytes to indicate flight level, three bytes to indicate compass direction and four bytes for distance. A total of 145 kB for a completely filled "space". The same data could be crammed into four bytes but would no longer be "human readable", though it would make the file just under 65 kB in size. Virtual Radar Server sorta does what I want, so that's what I've ended up using for now, but it's only 2D and only has four hardcoded altitude ranges. 0-9999, 10 000-19 999, 20 000-29 999 and 30 000+ ft. I'm mostly interested in the ranges at very low altitudes, say less than 2000 ft, so VRS doesn't quite fulfil my needs. But I guess there aren't any stand-alone solutions at the moment, which is understandable given that this is a very, very niche thing!
Write to /run .. don't save on the SD. Even small writes depending on SD card and failure mode during write can smoke the card. tar1090 now has ?pTracks
