Updated ADS-B Flight Tracking setup
A while ago I setup my flight tracking setup, but I was in an apartment, and could never get very good range, you can read the original article here
Now that I own a home, I have a lot more freedom in mounting the antenna, and I am not surrounded by tall buildings.
Here is my current setup, what components I used and what kind of performance I am getting
First, the components
- Raspberry Pi 4
- Official PoE Hat
- Argon NEO Raspberry Pi 4 Model B Heatsink Case (Thanks to Michael from TinyPilot for getting me into these)
- SanDisk Ultra 32GB microSDHC UHS-I card
- FlightAware Pro Stick Plus
- FlightAware ADS-B Dual 978 MHz + 1090 MHz Band-Pass SMA Filter
- FlightAware 1090 MHz ADS-B Antenna
- 15ft LMR-240 N Male to SMA Male 50 Ohm Coax cable - from eBay seller rr90650
I put the Pi in my garage rack, which you can read about here
I just threw it on top of the UPS, at some point in the future I want to make some kind of custom 1u case for it
At first, I had the antenna on the outside of my garage, it was temporary, just to see what kind of range I would get.
The range was good, but obviously it wasn't as high as the peak of the garage. I looked long and hard into mounting it higher, but I just didn't want to deal with lightning. I live in Houston, which is on the list for one of the cities with the most amount of lightning strikes per year
Eventually though, I needed to get gutters, so it had to come down. I decided to just install it in the ceiling of the garage, which would lose me some range because of the obstructions, but it would be much higher
Its not pretty, but it really doesn't need to be
The range I get is pretty great, at least compared to the range I had before
Along with FlightAware, I am feeding FR24 and ADSBExchange
If you feed FlightAware and FR24, you get free enterprise accounts for both of them
Overall, I think this is a great thing to setup. Its under $200 overall, and its great fun
Give it a shot. Message me if you need any more info, or join the Discord