I absolutely love planes – like loads! I love anything to do with planes, space, rockets, planes – all that stuff and I also love technology – so when a ‘10 Things to do with a Raspberry Pi‘ post I read years ago said ‘Track airplanes with a USB TV Stick‘ and I had both things lying around doing nothing, I was sold!
This was about 4 years ago, and I’ve had that original Raspberry Pi B running for ages sending data up to Flight Radar 24.
One of the benefits of doing so is when you provide them with data, they give you their best (Business) account for free – which gives you some cool features in the app.
Anyway – this post wont go into setting this up, I may write a Part -1 post for that in the future, but more to cover the awesome antenna upgrade as I was getting diminishing results with my bodged together one which I now know to be known as a ‘Di-pole’. (I think)
I started googling ‘best designs for a 1090MHz antenna’ and stumbled across an awesome article on qso365.co.uk about antenna designs and how they had found a home made ‘J-Pole Collinear’ antenna was getting pretty good results in comparison with what to me looks like a pretty expensive, up on a radio mast antenna!
As I’ve got about -£1 to put into hobbies like this, a DIY antenna was the way to go!
I got in touch for some designs and as you can see on the original post here: http://qso365.co.uk/2018/12/an-updated-internal-and-external-ads-b-comparison/ Keith got in touch with a design. After some to-ing and fro-ing due to my lack of knowledge in ‘radio stuff’ – I had enough of an idea to give it a whirl.
Lets step back a moment and have a look at my old antenna, for a laugh – this was now so degraded I was struggling to pick up planes flying directly overhead!
The design is pretty easy, a single core of copper wire, in specific measurements, bent into a spiral in the middle, then a U bend at the bottom. Easy! (You can find the exact diagram on the link above)
I grabbed some copper wire from a friend at work, and set to bending it to immense accuracy – within a few mm or so was good enough for me.
I decided I wanted to mount it as close to, and as fixed as possible to the coaxial connector that went into the USB-TV Dongle, so soldered the new antenna directly to the coax connector
Once it was done, I gave it a test downstairs at my desk and to my absolute surprise, and delight – it started picking up signals immediately, much further than my old one was! I rushed into the attic and put it somewhere sensible then came back down to check the map!
Wow… I literally couldn’t believe it! Having no knowledge on the technology used, radio comms, antenna design or anything – I’d literally spent 15 minutes bending some wire, 5 minutes soldering it and then shoved it onto a £10 USB-TV stick, and a 8 year old Raspberry Pi B was instantly picking up 29 aircraft, with 24 locations! The furthest of which was 161 nautical miles away off the coast of France!!!
Since then – I’m now pushing my data to Keiths Virtual Radar Server at essexradar.co.uk
Nice work, the now you can feed to flightaware, plane finder, radar box and of course ADSBexchange!