got into tracking airplanes using the FlightAware software.
I live right under the north/south airway between Los Angeles and San Francisco
where there is a lot of traffic. On any given day I will have seen 500 or more aircraft on my radar sceen.
Many of them 250 miles or further.
This screen shot was at 11am on a Wednesday
This link will take you to my stats page. Lots of info there for sure.
Setting up the system is pretty darn simple. All you need is a Raspberry Pi 3 recommended,
8GB micro SD card (class 10 suggested), an SDR dongle or purchase one from FlightAware,
home built (the collinear I built works fantastic) or
store bought antenna (FlightAware sells them also of course) and you are set to go.
A bit about antennas. The little mag mount one that comes with some SDR's will get you
on the air but one made or bought for 1090MHz and outside will get you great results.
I am fortunate to have a neighbor who is a contractor for Hughes satellites. I can get all of the coax I could ever use.
The first antenna I made from plans was a pain to build and ended up shorted. I then came across
the plans for one from ARRL. MUCH easier to build and with a couple of tweaks
I had a fantastic working collinear that I have up 15' in the open. The one thing
I found was cutting the center conductors much shorther than in the plans. I cut one about
1" and the other around 3/4". You will see why when reading the PDF file
from the link below. I used a piece of coax with an "F" connector already on it,
made it the same as the others and put it on the feed end. I then put
an adaptor "F" to PL-259 and hooked the coax to the dongle in the shack. Couldn't be much easier......
BTW the wire you see coming from the pole holding my collinear
is actually a piece of rope holding one end of my 64' OCF dipole...
Click here for the article from ARRL on building a collinear antenna
There are two ways to get up and running with the software.
First you can start from scratch installing the op system and flight
software going here FlightAware Build or if you already have a Pi
running Raspbian then go here FlightAware Install and just install the flight software.
With the build option you will download the image, burn it to your chip, do some editing
to the config file (just a regular text file) then plug the chip in and boot it up.
If you go the install option then it's using terminal to command and use the syntex from the web site.
With the install method you will need to edit the text file while on your Pi or take it out
and edit on your computer then put it back in. Either way the config file is simple
with just a few questions. If you will be running the system wireless all you need
is the name and password to your router. Running wired just say yes in the file.
That's it other than receiver type and SAY NO TO AUTO UPDATES!!
They messed me up more than once. Once you have the system running register
with FlightAware and you are good to go.
One last thing to be aware of. As of last year the newer versions of Raspbian do not have
SSH turned on by default. You will have to go into the raspi-conf setup to turn it on
or if you are linux savoy create a blank file in the /boot folder named SSH to turn it on.
That is only if you are planning on running the Pi headless. Other wise it won't matter.
Questions Or Comments.....John KD7AAT