davidcole: I’ve got one (off tm) from Flightradar24/plane-finder think one other site. Pretty crap reception, as I tried extending aerial to my 2nd floor ceiling space but it never worked.

Had another cheapie one that didn’t work for flight radar and I tried picking up weather stations with it, but couldn’t find any.

I am not an expert, but aerial length should be an exact fraction or multiple of the wavelength that you're interested in. Just extending it to some other random length won't necessarily help.

I was thinking about using this for an inflight poor man's ADS-B display. I didn't want extreme long range (20nm was plenty) and was told I could just use a straightened paperclip to get that.

If your roof is steel (or some other RF absorbent/reflective material), an aerial in your ceiling space is never going to work well.

frankv:

davidcole: I’ve got one (off tm) from Flightradar24/plane-finder think one other site. Pretty crap reception, as I tried extending aerial to my 2nd floor ceiling space but it never worked.

Had another cheapie one that didn’t work for flight radar and I tried picking up weather stations with it, but couldn’t find any.

I am not an expert, but aerial length should be an exact fraction or multiple of the wavelength that you're interested in. Just extending it to some other random length won't necessarily help.

I was thinking about using this for an inflight poor man's ADS-B display. I didn't want extreme long range (20nm was plenty) and was told I could just use a straightened paperclip to get that.

If your roof is steel (or some other RF absorbent/reflective material), an aerial in your ceiling space is never going to work well.

 

Much better coverage than mine... but it is still a temporary antenna sitting inside on the window sill facing the neighbours...

I also have a bit of interference from adjacent transmitters to deal with still.

1. ADS-B receiver, feeding multiple sites

2. 433MHz sniffer for my weather station

Technofreak: All these planespotters.

imagine the fun the trainspotters would have if trains could be tracked 

davidcole:

 

imagine the fun the trainspotters would have if trains could be tracked 

 

All the ones I've seen are on tracks 🤣

Technofreak: All these planespotters.

I have my SDR stick plugged into a little eeePC 701 laptop that lives in the garage.  The laptop would be close to 15 years old now, the screen doesn't work and it's pretty slow. Has enough CPU for SDR though, just.  My SDR stick scans a few "interesting frequencies" in Napier that, unlike the big smoke, aren't encrypted (yet).

The audio is then fed into a (private, password restricted!) icecast feed so I can listen in from anywhere.

I've been thinking about having a play around with ADS-B, but unsure on the best place to source kit; been looking at these two on Amazon, a FlightAware Pro dongle and 1090mhz aerial, but ends up being $131 NZD shipped here, so I'm sure there are probably cheaper options. Plus some cable to join them and a Pi or VM of course, but I can sort those locally.