ADS-B Receiver for mountain-top comms site

Monitoring aircraft via ADS-B is a terrific hobby and super easy to do. I get to have a display here that shows sometimes hundreds of aircraft (both commercial and general aviation) out to about 200 miles from the house.

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The above screen capture was from my Raspberry Pi running PiAware and connected to a homebrew 1090 MHz antenna up on the roof of the house. Nothing special in the setup, but look at the range! A/C at altitude are hearable out over the Grand Canyon and into California. Occasionally I get a/c into or out of Mexico, and I can see traffic in the southwest corner of New Mexico.

I’m planning to put one of these receivers on a local hilltop, about 3000′ above my house and the Valley floor, and yesterday installed the antenna on a temporary mount on the tower at the site. I connected it to my most recent ADS-B receiver setup, seen below, and was awestruck at the coverage. Was seeing a/c over Los Angeles and Albuquerque!

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It’s a bit tricky to put a cheap SDR dongle anywhere near radio transmitters, and the hilltop that I was on is loaded with them. In fact, the building in which I have some current monitoring equipment is only 50′ away from a huge comms tower with dozens of two-way radio antennas, and a lot of potential interference. The ADS-B receiver antenna is right in the center of the picture, on the end of a piece of unistrut attached to the tower legs. In the background, nearly a dozen towers bristling with antennas.

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The secret to success is a very good filter in front of the SDR receiver. That black square near the middle of the picture is exactly that. It’s a custom-made cavity filter, only 50 MHz wide, centered at 1090 MHz. Extremely sharp rolloff and ultimate rejection about 100 dB. Really helps the RTL-SDR receiver.

However, I wasn’t able to leave the receiver up on the hill yesterday, I was troubleshooting other issues and didn’t have time to set up the network connection to my receiver. Next time I will hopefully get it installed and on the air!

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