ADSB ⁽²⁾

I have been running an ADS-B decoder here for many years now and feeding flightradar24. However, yesterday I got an email alert that the decoder was offline. it seemed ok locally as the status said it was connected but it was no seeing any aircraft. This was last night but there were plenty of aircraft near enough. On further checking via the flightradar24 website it seemed the maximum distance seen was just 2 miles. One aircraft took off from the local airport and the decoder did see it, but only for a short while. So, off into the loft. I swapped the dbv dongle. No change. I took the preamp out of curcuit. No change. I installed the latest fr24feed. No change. Hmmm. Then it was time for bed... This morning I checked the collinear using the TinyVNA and it showed it was fine. I swapped the antenna lead that came with the dongle for an adapter type. No change! Back to the software then. I have not changed the setup for ages, in fact not since I migrated the decoder from a Pi to a Linux box. And it was always fine until now. Shutting fr24feed and dump1090-mutability down…

One of my Pi 4B systems runs an ADSB grabber for Flightradar24 *. A few weeks ago it lots the SD Card so I rebuilt it. That card had been in for some time but I didn't record when. Silly. Anyway, a few weeks went by and it lost the new one. Now, rebuilding is not a huge issue as I record every step in a file, so rebuilding takes maybe 30 minutes and I never bother to image the SD card because if I add a step then I would need to make a new image etc. So I rebuilt it again but this time I added the SDD which was originally the server Pi disk (thay was replace dby an actual mini PC with a spinning disk). The Pi was in a 3D printed case but the SDD was just resting behind it on top of one of the radios. Off to printables.com - there were a few models for Pi systems with SDDs but none of the vertical stack types would fit. Then I found one which has the Pi and SDD side by side and it works really well. The Pi has a PoE HAT and…