This Can't Be This Hard To Do...

Hello Fellow Airplane Nerd Friends!

Every once in awhile, I get a hankerin' to become a step less dependent on others, and decide that I'm going to (try to) learn something new and exciting. Because Murphy is the ripe bastard that he's always been, insisting on oppressing ... .. well... me, what from all angles and just plain old decency to be an easy win for me, get that old self confidence up a little more, maybe enough to try something else new, maybe a little more challenging. But nope, what I thought was going to be a chapter 1, first lesson activity is no where on the Interwebs... Seriously, no where, I made sure to look. So, now that I've stored away any pride that hadn't retreated to the depths of my brain stem, let's discuss...

Anyone know and these new Softwhere Definition Ray-dee-yo's? .... Kidding, I've been lurking here too many years to be that foolhardy. So, SDRs, finally a affordable but it's common folk, just needed to give the Chinese 20 years to steal-n-copy enough of the Gen 1 monsters for them to do what they do best, scale down the size while scaling up production in order to flood the global market and cause prices to collapse right down to my level!

I've used SDRs for probably 10 years now, but was never the individual smart enough to know what to do with those big ole SBS 3s we used. I just helped deploy the address assembled kits and configure the set up, easy peasy stuff. There were things that I could never understand about some of the SBS 3's required configuration which didn't square with my understanding of ADS-B system theory and operational concepts. At the time I was already north of 3 decades wandering around the civil aviation industry trying to find a professional career track I enjoyed. Despite my ADD-esque bouncing from one unrelated industry sector to another, over and over every 2½ years, ADS-B was always the new hotness. For this particular setup, they were running an SBS 3 with an Intel Nuc loaded with a custom tweaked version of Dump1090 which was driving the bus.

What I couldn't figure out is why this setup wasn't capable of acquiring, decoding, and piping the flight track data up to the servers until the precise georeferenced coordinates representing the system setup location was entered into some obscure data field within the software. I should note, there were no requirements for any MLAT capabilities, nor were these integrated into a common network anywhere close to being robust enough to try to make it work for funsies. Are the SBS 3s even capable of chewing the data fast enough to accommodate the additional processing demands MLAT requires without choking out? Anyway, if there is no MLATing, the location of the SDR is irrelevant, the location of the antenna is irrelevant, and the location of the intel Nuc is irrelevant. The only relevent locations are those of the aircraft which as luck would have it are reporting that data to the antenna, and to the SDR, and to the Nuc, and eventually to the servers which will use those locations to render a beautiful overlay of the near real time locations of lots of airplanes, and doing so without ever worrying about where setup location is because it's all just irrelevant. Is anything familiar enough with those older Gen 1 SDRs to be able to say if this was required by all SBS 3s, and if so, maybe you know why?

Ok, I still need to get to my issue at hand, which I meant to include way up ☝️ there.

I've downloaded 5 or 6 of the free SDR configuration software, played around with the buttons and sliders which I had no clue did, dug around in the menus, I even read some of the guidance documentation, but still have no idea how to do what I want to do. I thought the noises the various frequencies and bandwidth settings made, but beyond that, I have no interest in any of the frequencies which aren't 1090 MHz. I don't even need UAT 978 MHz, just 1090 MHz. But I just don't know how to tune the dang SDRs as a persistent configuration. I can tune them when they are connected to my computer and hear the bleeps and bloops the data sounds like while trying not to have a siezure from staring at the waterfall thing. But that's it, when I disconnect the SDR, I'm pretty certain the frequency I was hallucinating to isn't retained, it would not work if I tried to configure it with my Raspberry Pi 4, and I can't believe that setting a configured frequency is hard, because it's so simple in my mind!

Thankfully many of the SDR manufacturers and distributors take pity on people like me, and pre-configure their SDRs for me. I want to become more independent, I want to do it myself.

I'm using the new version of the Nooelec Nano 3s as a means of reducing the footprint and weight of the final build as much as I can. They aren't as gucci as the RTL-SDR v3s which I will need to use in some applications where an active bias tee powered antenna is needed. I was a little concerned about the remarkable amount of waste heat the Nano 3s seem to be shedding adequately based on the two beta builds I've been running for the last week or so. I didn't even use the great sinks which were included, and they are fully enclosed in the case I'm going with, and not a hicup between them. I'll let you know how they fare during the extreme condition stress test they'll be put through in a week or so. Regardless of how well they perform in 140°F for a few hours, for all the final builds I'm planning on completely submerging all the components in thermally conductive potting compound by filling all the cases to the top. Yeah, it'll draw out and shed the hell out of the component waste heat, but I am also interested in the other 3 benefits of using that stuff. They'll be absolutely water proof, sand/dust proof, AND be able to take a few more drops than without. Win win win.

Ok, so, this is because of COVIDS, and being holed up with just my dog for a year. I really need to communicate with people more to help prevent my writing a novel when I have a question. Oh well, if you read the whole thing, you're a bad ass. If you tech me to make my SDRs play nice, you're the King/Queen of all Bad-Assery.

God Speed!

Pete