Plane Spotters / Flight Radar Thread

Nazbit · 1 Sep 2020 at 22:23

I finished the day yesterday on 1,551 aircraft and 328,481 positions.

I thought that was pretty reasonable for an indoor setup.

That puts me at the top of the FA league table for my area on aircraft seen and 4th for positions.

Some of those close to me seem to be getting another 100,000 positions but 100-300 aircraft less.

I still need to install polar.sh and maybe timeplase1090 as well.

Edit: gain wise I'm more or less in range all of the time now but I'll keep an eye on it and hopefully that script will just take care of it without any thought

Feek · 3 Sep 2020 at 12:45

That sounds good to me. I'm sure you can predict what I'm going to ask next

Do you fancy adding the feed to Essex Radar?

andy_mk3 · 3 Sep 2020 at 13:01

Feek said:
That sounds good to me. I'm sure you can predict what I'm going to ask next

Do you fancy adding the feed to Essex Radar?

On that subject, mine is down temporarily, but will try and get it back up and running by the weekend.

Nazbit · 3 Sep 2020 at 13:10

Feek said:
That sounds good to me. I'm sure you can predict what I'm going to ask next

Do you fancy adding the feed to Essex Radar?

Yeah I'm happy to do that provided the network overhead is low and that it doesn't present any security issues

Presume there's nothing inbound for me to worry about? I just fire my feed to you?

neodude · 3 Sep 2020 at 19:11

My system is back running on my old Cantenna as I prepare my FA Antenna to eventually get put up on a 10' pole on the gable end of my house along with my Airband Antenna. Was going to do it myself but the wife has forbidden it

She probably makes a fair argument. Gonna get a guy in next week to sling it up for me

I'm also in the process of setting up a failover WAN via 4G in my PfSense box so that my stats don't suffer if I lose internet, and so the local spotters can still access my feed.

Feek · 3 Sep 2020 at 19:15

Nazbit said:
Yeah I'm happy to do that provided the network overhead is low and that it doesn't present any security issues

Presume there's nothing inbound for me to worry about? I just fire my feed to you?

No, I don't think the overhead is massive - I have quite a few feeding in here and I feed out to a fair few places but I really don't notice any overhead whatsoever. Nothing inbound for you whatsoever, I'll just give you a very simple five line script that uses socat to push the feed to me along with an entry in cron to keep an eye on it.

Thank you - Can you fire me off a trust message please and I'll email you the details.

neodude said:
Was going to do it myself but the wife has forbidden it

Yeah, I still do some climbing but nowhere near as much as I used to when it comes to aerial work.

Nazbit · 4 Sep 2020 at 16:07

Anyone pick up an emergency squawk from a Lancaster Bomber reg-PA474?

It turned back and descended and headed for Coningsby.

Hope it landed safely. What a machine.

Feek · 6 Sep 2020 at 11:47

The feed from Nazbit is working well

no idea what said:
On that subject, mine is down temporarily, but will try and get it back up and running by the weekend.

Still down

Nazbit · 6 Sep 2020 at 12:47

Feek said:
The feed from Nazbit is working well

Still down

Think the range plot has pretty much filled out by now.

Do you all find Friday is the busiest day? This is my peak traffic so far with this new receiver and first time breaking the 100 aircraft and 1000 messages per second barrier.

Average for daytime tends to be 50-80 aircraft and 600-800 messages per second but thats better than I was getting with my old receiver.

Finding the polar graphs very interesting too. Can clearly see the arrivals and departures from Hawarden, Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds Bradford, East Midlands and Birmingham.

The hot spot over Shropshire is the Helicopter Training School at RAF Shawbury. I often see 3 - 6 helicopters up at a time most weekdays. Usually Airbus 135s or 145s painted up in the yellow and blue livery that you typically see on police helicopters.

Does anyone know what the hot spot north of Manchester airport is? At first I thought it was a stack for Man but as the day went on and the graph built up it looks like a small airfield? Not been able to work it out from any maps and aviation charts are a total mystery to me.

At a high level most of my traffic is from London / Europe long hall on its way to join the ETOPS airways to the USA and Canada.

andy_mk3 · 6 Sep 2020 at 12:50

Feek said:
Still down

I spent yesterday fixing family members cars unfortunately! That's tonights project

DustyMiller · 6 Sep 2020 at 17:15

Feek, Blimey, your getting good coverage into central europe. Any plans to expand the essexradar feeds ?

Feek · 6 Sep 2020 at 17:50

@DustyMiller I’m happy to add UK feeds to complement what I’ve got but I’m not specifically looking for anything else within Europe.

no idea what said:
I spent yesterday fixing family members cars unfortunately! That's tonights project

Priorities

Nazbit said:
Finding the polar graphs very interesting too.

I like them, I don’t look at mine every day but it’s good to see.

FBi7 · 6 Sep 2020 at 22:10

Nazbit said:
Does anyone know what the hot spot north of Manchester airport is?

I'd take a guess an Manchester Barton EGCB, now known as City Airport and Heliport.

https://www.visitcityairport.co.uk/

john_s · 7 Sep 2020 at 19:25

FBi7 said:
I'd take a guess an Manchester Barton EGCB

That would be my guess too. The compact circuit suggests general aviation to me.

nst68 · 9 Sep 2020 at 10:19

@Feek just used your website to identify a Spitfire that went over Chelmsford and then saw that the coverage extends to the Czech Republic, is your equipment that's picking up that far or is someone else feeding that data?

Nazbit · 9 Sep 2020 at 10:25

@nst68 @Feek has minions now. If you go to Settings > Options > Reciever you'll see the various locations of those contributing to the feed and you can select each one individually to see what they're seeing with their recieving equipment.

Feek · 9 Sep 2020 at 11:19

Nazbit said:
If you go to Settings > Options > Reciever you'll see the various locations of those contributing to the feed and you can select each one individually to see what they're seeing with their recieving equipment.

I have nothing more to add

nst68 · 9 Sep 2020 at 15:12

Nazbit said:
@nst68 @Feek has minions now. If you go to Settings > Options > Reciever you'll see the various locations of those contributing to the feed and you can select each one individually to see what they're seeing with their recieving equipment.

Feek said:
I have nothing more to add

You've even got your minions answering questions for you now

Snaggle · 9 Sep 2020 at 16:25

cheapest way to do this ? with list of parts pls

Feek · 9 Sep 2020 at 22:59

Raspberry Pi 4 2Gb - £34
SD card - £8
PSU - £8
FlightAware Pro Stick Plus receiver - £23.50
FlightAware aerial - £44 or take a look at this thread and build your own.
Coax cable to link aerial to dongle - £unknown because of length but buy the best you can afford. I'm partial to Hyperflex 10 but Ultraflex 7 is relatively decent

nst68 said:
You've even got your minions answering questions for you now