This was an excellent article that handheld me through building firstly a FlightAware tracking station and then showing how to install FlightRadar24 along side it. It then goes onto show how to...
This was an excellent article that handheld me through building firstly a FlightAware tracking station and then showing how to install FlightRadar24 along side it.
It then goes onto show how to share the data you collect with both FlightAware and FlightRadar24 and so register for free accounts to the tune of ~$900 saved.
I used a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B Rev 1.2 with a 64Gb card (of which 4% is used after 10 days). I only used this for two reasons, one is that it was on the shelf behind me and secondly it had a 3.5" inch LCD screen and I had read that the PiAware software supported LCD screens. Apparently any model will run the software (according to the article, I can not confirm)
I had to buy a Software Defined Radio (SDR) adapter to enable me to monitor ADS-B signals and that was an eBay purchase for £8.67 ($11).
Then following the article, I downloaded the PiAware software, transferred it to the memory card, did the tweaks as per the article, installed the card and the SDR and aerial and powered it up.
And it all worked out of the box. Following the instructions in the article enabled DHCP to allocate it an address and once I had found it (It advertised itself as piaware on my router) I could access both SSH and the Webfront end and see what was showing up on the SDR.
I then followed the instructions and added FlightRadar24 and shared the data with both for my free accounts.
Once I was sure it was working I mounted the whole thing in my shed with the aerial mounted on the roof and let it do its thing.
From where I am, which is near both Liverpool John Lennon Airport and Manchester I 'see' about 800 to 900 aircraft a day
The only thing I was a little bit disappointed about was the LCD Display. It does work but all it display is status of the different scanned type (1090 Radio, Mlat and ADS-B) and internal Pi stats like temperature and uptime. If I built another one I would not bother with a display.
So if you have a Pi hanging about doing nothing, give it a go. It was fun and cheap.
I've been feeding ADSB with a Rapberry Pi for quite a while now. Starting with an off the shelf SDR was fun, but getting a dedicated receiver, antenna and cavity filter really upped my game. My...
I've been feeding ADSB with a Rapberry Pi for quite a while now.
Starting with an off the shelf SDR was fun, but getting a dedicated receiver, antenna and cavity filter really upped my game.
My current hardware :
Raspberry Pi 3A+ with an official Raspberry 5.1V 3A power supply (USB-C with micro USB converter). Having a weak power supply gave me "unstable clock" error messages that rendered MLAT very unreliable. I've also fixed the CPU clock to 1GHz permanently in order to tackle any clock issue. There's a Pimoroni fan shim controlled by the gpio-fan dtoverlay module. The CPU only reaches around 40% use when dealing with 1400 frames per second.
FlightAware Pro Stick Plus, a dedicated SDR with amplifier and 1090 filter built-in (~40€)
1090 MHz cavity filter from Sysmocom, as a cell tower is in sight from my antenna (~50€)
55cm +5dBi ADSB antenna from Jetvision (~80€).
It's currently feeding to FlightRadar24, FlightAware and ADSBExchange. I've also been sharing to the Opensky Network for a while, but all combined it was using a bit of bandwidth and my DSL is not unlimited.
I've had an issue with FlightRadar24 last year (it's the base of my raspberry pi image) due to a bad setup of Flightaware that fed MLAT data back to dump1090. That gave unexpected data from FR24 point of view and my account was automatically blocked. Their support is excellent and after a few days of back and forth we understood what was going on, adapted my dump1090 settings and all went back to normal.
EDIT : It sees between 3700 and 4000 aircrafts per day.
I've been feeding for a couple years. I'm actually running the decoder on a Pi 0W and the feeders on my home server as the 0W is barely powerful enough to manage the decoder. Some of the services...
I've been feeding for a couple years. I'm actually running the decoder on a Pi 0W and the feeders on my home server as the 0W is barely powerful enough to manage the decoder. Some of the services I'm running:
This was an excellent article that handheld me through building firstly a FlightAware tracking station and then showing how to install FlightRadar24 along side it.
It then goes onto show how to share the data you collect with both FlightAware and FlightRadar24 and so register for free accounts to the tune of ~$900 saved.
I used a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B Rev 1.2 with a 64Gb card (of which 4% is used after 10 days). I only used this for two reasons, one is that it was on the shelf behind me and secondly it had a 3.5" inch LCD screen and I had read that the PiAware software supported LCD screens. Apparently any model will run the software (according to the article, I can not confirm)
I had to buy a Software Defined Radio (SDR) adapter to enable me to monitor ADS-B signals and that was an eBay purchase for £8.67 ($11).
Then following the article, I downloaded the PiAware software, transferred it to the memory card, did the tweaks as per the article, installed the card and the SDR and aerial and powered it up.
And it all worked out of the box. Following the instructions in the article enabled DHCP to allocate it an address and once I had found it (It advertised itself as piaware on my router) I could access both SSH and the Webfront end and see what was showing up on the SDR.
I then followed the instructions and added FlightRadar24 and shared the data with both for my free accounts.
Once I was sure it was working I mounted the whole thing in my shed with the aerial mounted on the roof and let it do its thing.
From where I am, which is near both Liverpool John Lennon Airport and Manchester I 'see' about 800 to 900 aircraft a day
The only thing I was a little bit disappointed about was the LCD Display. It does work but all it display is status of the different scanned type (1090 Radio, Mlat and ADS-B) and internal Pi stats like temperature and uptime. If I built another one I would not bother with a display.
So if you have a Pi hanging about doing nothing, give it a go. It was fun and cheap.
I've been feeding ADSB with a Rapberry Pi for quite a while now.
Starting with an off the shelf SDR was fun, but getting a dedicated receiver, antenna and cavity filter really upped my game.
My current hardware :
It's currently feeding to FlightRadar24, FlightAware and ADSBExchange. I've also been sharing to the Opensky Network for a while, but all combined it was using a bit of bandwidth and my DSL is not unlimited.
I've had an issue with FlightRadar24 last year (it's the base of my raspberry pi image) due to a bad setup of Flightaware that fed MLAT data back to dump1090. That gave unexpected data from FR24 point of view and my account was automatically blocked. Their support is excellent and after a few days of back and forth we understood what was going on, adapted my dump1090 settings and all went back to normal.
EDIT : It sees between 3700 and 4000 aircrafts per day.
I've been feeding for a couple years. I'm actually running the decoder on a Pi 0W and the feeders on my home server as the 0W is barely powerful enough to manage the decoder. Some of the services I'm running:
I printed a small enclosure to hang on the wall, and have since plopped in a 4 digit LCD that displays the number of aircraft overhead.
SDR Enthusiasts' GitBook is a good resource for setting much of this up.