Splat!

After returning home from work this morning, following a hard session at the gym, the ADS-B aggregation had done a little over 24h, allowing time to receive squitters from a whole weekdays worth of scheduled, charter, military and general aviation flights, plus all the overnight cargo flights.

The resulting aggregated plot, known as a 'splat', for reasons which should become apparent, for the 1090MHz Ground Plane antenna, mounted on Sams south facing windowsill, is shown below

It is clear that coverage to the north in this situation is very sketchy, and to the west very poor due to having to also pass through the bulk of the neighbours property as well. The best coverage area, both for high altitude (red, purple) and low level (greens) is unsurprisingly to the south-west, this being the visually least obstructed view from Sams window.

I need to say many thanks to my old colleague Mike, who has supplied me with another Raspberry Pi SBC for Sam, to replace the one I am pushing into service for this project. Sams Pi is a model B+. I expected the one from Mike to be either a B+ or one of the older models, but to my great surprise he's sent a 3B! This is the current model, which includes WiFi, and is faster and has more RAM than the B+.  Im sure Sam will put it to good use. Mike also sent a Microbit SBC, a device I had never had my hands on, but Sam has used at school. And, if all that wasnt great enough - my Pi Zero W was delivered as well! Lots of great embedded processing options available to us now!

Whilst all this has been going on, ive also been building a 1:72 scale model of a Sopwith Camel! Ive just put the undercarriage on, which just leaves the upper wing for tomorrow!

In my previous post I showed a layout plan of the ADS-B system proposal. One thing that occurs to me is that since the system will be installed in a plastic tube, and the electronics mounted on a board slotted up the middle, there is no reason to try and fit all the electronics on the same side of the carrier! The carrier board effectively divides the tube into two semicircular spaces, so the Pi and RTL could go on one side, and the USB splitter, PoE splitter and Buck Converter on the other.



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