Advice on upgrading receiver equipment

[murtaza12]

Hi,

I've been running my current PiAware + FR24 setup since early 2017 with a Raspberry Pi, a NooElec NESDR Mini 2+ and it's supplied antenna. It's currently on the ground floor of my house and the antenna is indoors, so the range and overall performance of the setup is quite poor.

I recently managed to get the 26" FlightAware ADS-B Antenna and the FlightAware ProStick Plus USB receiver.

I'd like to mount the antenna on the roof of the house to get the best possible coverage/range, however I'm having some trouble planning the upgrade.

There is power on the roof right where I want to mount the antenna so my first thought was to mount the antenna on a pole right by the water tank, and keep the RPi under the water tank to protect it from direct sunlight. However, I decided against this since I didn't want the RPi to be outside.

My next thought was to just bring the RPi inside, and get a really long coax cable from the antenna to the ProStick+, however I read that this would cause significant loss since the cable would have to be at least 50 ft long.

I've read of people using USB extension cables for their USB receivers since they're quite big when plugged in to the RPi directly and block access to the other USB ports. However, in these cases people usually use short cables.

I wanted to know whether a really long USB extension cable would work in this case and if so, what sort of effect would it have on the performance of the whole setup?

To make it easier to understand my question, I'm attaching a very ugly diagram I drew up on MS Paint.

This seems to be the easiest way for me to tackle this because I can mount the ProStick+ underneath the water tank to protect it from direct sunlight, and just run a short cable from it to the antenna which will be a few meters above.

Would appreciate if I could get some suggestions from the experts on this or any other possible ways I could set this up.

Thanks

[GlynH]

If it were me I would put the RPi and NooElec in a waterproof enclosure (even a tupperware box might suffice?) outside under the water tank or somewhere else sheltered, a short length of good quality coax from antenna to NooElec and just run a Cat5e/6 ethernet cable from the RPi back inside and to a network switch or directly into your router.

As I am a fan of PoE I would fit a PoE HAT to the RPi (assuming it is either a Model 3B or 4) and use either an existing PoE switch or add a PoE Injector to provide power and data along one robust, industry standard network cable.

If at any time you need to power-cycle the RPi it should be easy to toggle the PoE on and off from inside or even disconnect the network cable after shutting the RPi down to negate any SD Card corruption.

I would also try and get the antenna mounted higher to clear the water tank although that may already be your aim and hasn't come across in your MS Paint diagram?

My instinct would be to steer clear of long USB and/or coax cables. A long ethernet cable should not be an issue in your situation.

I run all of my RPi's on PoE including the virtual radar box but am lucky in that mounted in the loft my RPi is hanging on a short 5m length of good quality Westflex 103 coax from the external Watson antenna otherwise I would have no hesitation in mounting it outside despite my access being limited as my antenna has been fixed atop a 16 foot pole mounted high on the side of the house for the last 12 years!

Hope that helps?

-=Glyn=-