I have dun maked a Thing!
I dun used all a these bits…
Question is : What have I made… ?
Clues: Its not very useful right now but did save me several hundred pounds on something…
Just as an aside if you also have a Pi, a Freeview/Software Defined Radio stick you can make one too.
It puts me in a league table where I am ranked at 25,164 and climbed 90 places today
The Antenna came with the SDR and is the one that happened to be on the mag mount when I put it on the roof of my office.
In an ideal situation I need to buy one centred on the relevant frequency and get it on a pole.
Having an active tracking station gives you access to the business version of the interface so you can see all sorts of plane based geekery.
So next Friday, when a plane flies over (possibly earlier but traffic is low) you will be able to see where its been.
So far I can receive from planes that are 120 miles away with a generic whip antenna on a shelf bracket but only in one direction as it is sitting on a sloping tiled roof.
By sharing ADS-B data with Flightradar24, not only will you help make real-time flight data available to millions of aviation enthusiasts, but as a thank you, you’ll also receive a free Flightradar24 Business Plan subscription (a USD 499.99/year value).
Cos I was just teetering on the brink of blowing $499.99
Highly recommended building a collinear antenna and adding lownoise pre-amp really pulls the signals then as the rtl based SDR’s quite high noise though very dependent on your line of sight.
I got one of those NESDR smart sdrs also :-), along with the many others lol ok i got 7 i need therapy for the addition lol.
I do prefer my airspy mini for 1090 but more ££ over the NESDR
Got about 250miles range to the east south east and Jack all to the west due to hills a Twitter pic of my range I am not centred on the map location wise I actually to the left of the range in the walls boarder. https://twitter.com/20IPM/status/890663279588016128?s=03
This has mileage due to its easy bodge-together design
“A 1/4 wave ground plane antenna works extremely well, I made this one with 69mm top element and four slightly shorter length radials to allow for the distance between the centre element and the edge of the flange.
It is critical to measure these correctly, cut the radials to size measuring from the centre element. It is easier to do this with the radials at the horizontal, then bend them to 45-60 degrees.”
nicely executed a Franklin (Nothing to do with James Franklin ETHunter) antenna is quite easy to build also and should be an improvement step up if you want to experiment