best antenna

[abcd567]

.....I'd dispute those:
(1) when doing my initial set-up with the dongle and supplied antenna - I'd get maybe 50 miles range with it on the window board inside the window - opening the window, putting it on the cill outside, and closing the window on the wire increased range by about 50%.
(2) raising the antenna has a huge influence mainly due to getting it above local stuff that blocks the signal and possibly in eliminating some local reflections .....

As regards your point (1) I will try to find out the figures for attenuation (dB) caused by buildings as a whole, as well as attenuation figures (dB/meter thickness) for construction materials such as concrete, wood & glass. There has been lot of studies on this issue in connection with Cell/Mobile Phones & Wireless LAN. Once we have these figures, our discussions will be more quantitative, rather than qualitative as it is right now.

As regards point (2), what you have said is exactly what I was trying to say. Antenna height sure helps in getting over local obstructions, but does NOT appreciably increase RANGE in non-obstructed directions. Therefore once the antenna is above the height of local obstructions, any more increase in height does not give any benefit, rather increases cost, effort, problems of wind & lightning.

......Raspberry pi might not be ideal, I believe Plane Plotter requires windows - FlightAware do have a Pi feeder for use on their own box - but last time I looked, they'd not released it as a separate software item. Maybe you'd be better off with an atom based single board computer or windows netbook.

back to the original question:
* Raspberry pi model B
* Case for the same (this is really to protect the SD card slot since side pressure on the card can easily damage the slot and the SC card won't press against the spring contacts)
* 5v 2A power supply with micro USB connector (you may have an blackberry / andriod phone charger that will work)
* some 4Gb (or more) SD cards (one for use, others to try alternate configs)
* It's helpful to have USB keyboard & mouse and an HDMI cable to connect to monitor or TV.
* Some method to write images to SD card - does your PC have an SD card slot?

Mostly for this - you'll run as light a weight debian as you can - the richer flavours like ubuntu may have drivers built in to drive the dongle as a TV receiver, which you have to disable to get rtl1090 / dump1090 to work. most of this is done on the command line - see the first few posts in http://forum.flightradar24.com/threa...e-to-feed-FR24 (probably best to continue this conversation there).......

Thank you for your valuable advise. It is a great help to me, and possibly to many other forum members as well.

[peterhr]

With the glass, it may be influenced by the coatings used to retain infrared


Sent from my Nexus 4 using Tapatalk

[abcd567]

With the glass, it may be influenced by the coatings used to retain infrared


Sent from my Nexus 4 using Tapatalk

I found some data for Building Entry Loss for UHF/Microwaves

Building Penetration Loss-1

SOURCE:
Iternational Telecommunication Union (ITU)'s RECOMMENDATION ITU-R P.679-2, 1999


Representative UHF signal attenuation observed within rooms located near an exterior wall in timber-framed private homes is summarized in Table 1. For interior rooms, 0.6 dB must be added to the tabulated values. For timber framed buildings the attenuation shows little variation with weather or path elevation angle but, as the table illustrates, there is a systematic variation with frequency, construction materials, insulation and position within the structure. Some aluminium-backed insulating and construction materials contribute up to 20 dB of loss.

Note: TapaTalk does not display tables properly. Desktops & Laptops do.

TABLE 1
UHF signal attenuation (dB) through timber-framed buildings*

Building condition		Attenuation
Exterior	Insulation (non-metallic type)	860 MHz	1,550 MHz
Wood siding	Ceiling only	2.9 dB	5.0 dB
Wood siding	Ceiling and wall	4.5 dB	6.6 dB
Brick Veneer Briques	Ceiling only	4.1 dB	6.2 dB
Brick Veneer Briques	Ceiling and wall	5.7 dB	7.8 dB

* The table is for rooms located near to the exterior wall; for interior rooms, 0.6 dB should be added.


TABLE 2
Signal distributions at the average position and best position within buildings
(over the frequency range 700 to 1,800 MHz)

Building number	Construction	Remarks	Mean loss, Average position	Mean loss, Best position
1	Corner office, large windows, single-story building. Concrete block, plasterboard, double-glazing. Concrete roof on steel beams	Line of Sight through window	7.9 dB	4.2 dB
2	Small room with windows being 5/8 of exterior wall	Line of Sight through window	9.1 dB	5.4 dB
3	Corner foyer, large reflective glass door in half of one exterior wall. External walls concrete, internal walls plasterboard on metal frame	Line of Sight through window	15.4 dB	9.7 dB
4	Sheet metal shack with plywood interior. One small unscreened window on each of two sides, metal-covered door		9.7 dB	5.2 dB
5	Two-story wood-side house, rockwool insulation (walls and attic); gypsum board, no metallic heat-shield. No metallic screens on windows. Wood shingled roof		9.0 dB	5.4 dB
6	Empty sheet-metal mobile trailer home, metal frame windows with metal screens		24.9 dB	19.8 dB

.

[peterhr]

3db = loss of 50% of the signal strength doesn't it?
6db = 75% loss???

[1090 MHz]

3db = loss of 50% of the signal strength doesn't it?
6db = 75% loss???

Yes every 3dB is half the signal lost.

[abcd567]

3db = loss of 50% of the signal strength doesn't it?
6db = 75% loss???

Although the Tables in my last post prove that what I believed was wrong, I felt obliged to put these on forum, even if it caused me some embarrassment.

Yes, you are right. Every 3dB loss halves the strength, so -3dB reduces signal to 1/2, -6dB reduces signal to 1/4, -9 dB reduces signal to 1/8 etc etc...

I was astonished to see the loss figures in the Tables I have posted above. The loss figures are far too higher than I expected. I am now trying to dig out data from other sources to find out if the figures in the tables above are correct or not.

[t-kclt2]

...or you could walk around the house and see the range change as you move the antenna around.. I see it here, even in the attic and it is very noticeable.. Mind you, the signal seems strong enough to steal traffic from our F-'s but it could be much better if the antenna was outside

[abcd567]

.
Building Penetration Loss -2

SOURCE: Communications Research Centre, Industry Canada: Paper dated April 2011.

Apparently conflicting results have been reported in the literature concerning the dependence of building penetration loss on frequency. While several researchers have reported measurements indicating that building penetration loss decreases with increasing frequency in the VHF and UHF range, results by other researchers suggest the opposite, or that there is no significant dependence on frequency at all.

It has been noted that the frequency dependence of penetration loss appears to be strongly dependent on the type of building construction.

For residential buildings, which are typically constructed from non-metallic building materials such as wood, cinder block, brick veneer and glass, penetration loss has been found to be relatively low and to increase with increasing frequency. This observation is supported by results of laboratory measurements on a variety of common building materials, which show that, while propagation losses through most building materials are almost the same at 2.4 and 5 GHz, red brick and cinder block are notable exceptions; losses associated with these materials are 10.1 and 3.6 dB higher, respectively, at the higher frequency.

Industrial and commercial buildings, on the other hand, are often of steel-framed construction, and the corresponding predominant building materials are reinforced concrete, steel, and aluminum; loss through these materials is relatively much higher, and the dominant penetration mode is through slots such as windows and other frame openings, or even through grid openings in in steel-reinforced concrete slabs. Losses associated with propagation through slots tend to be strongly frequency-selective, and overall decrease with increasing frequency, as the slot dimensions become larger in terms of the wavelength.

TapaTalk does NOT display tables properly. Desktops & Laptops do.

Table 3: Estimates of building penetration loss at 700 and 2,500 MHz.

Building Type	700 MHz	2,500 MHz
Residential	4.6 dB	8.5 dB
Industrial/Commercial	14.5 dB	10.2 dB

Fig. 1: Measured building penetration loss versus frequency, for residential buildings.
building-penetration-loss-vs-frequency.png


.

[abcd567]

.
Building Penetration Loss -3

Source: COST 231 , 1999, a project of EUROCOST "The European Co-operative for Scientific and Technical research" or "Coopération européenne dans le domaine de la recherche Scientifique et Technique", which is a European Union Forum for cooperative scientific research.

TapaTalk does NOT display tables properly. Desktops & Laptops do.

Table 4: Transmission losses for external walls made of different materials in 1 - 2 Ghz frequency band

MATERIAL	LOSS
Porus Concrete	6.5 dB
Reinforced Glass	8 dB
Concrete (30 cm)	9.5 dB
Thick Concrete Wall (25 cm) With Large Glazed Panes	11 dB
Thick Concrete Wall (25 cm) Without Glazed Panes	13 dB
Thick Wall (>20cm)	15 dB
Tile	23 dB

[charan]

Guys please help me, i made nearly four antennas still no luck check this 1.jpg2.jpg too much noise and very less range more or less same for all antennas and antenna is on my roof with clear view of sky and i'm getting tired doing antenna since two weeks continuesly please help me. why is that disturbance and if i set gains to auto im getting very weak signal and can only get when aircraft overhead. and if i reduced the gain manually again range is decreasing please please please help..

[peterhr]

you should get more than that with the little aerial supplied with the dongle - what does that give you if placed with a reasonable view of the sky?

(I'm wondering if you have a bad dongle)

also check you don't have a short circuit in the antenna feed by using the resistance test ranges on a multimeter.

[Speed Daemon]

Guys please help me, i made nearly four antennas still no luck check this [ATTACH=CONFIG]3576[/ATTACH][ATTACH=CONFIG]3577[/ATTACH] too much noise and very less range more or less same for all antennas and antenna is on my roof with clear view of sky and i'm getting tired doing antenna since two weeks continuesly please help me. why is that disturbance and if i set gains to auto im getting very weak signal and can only get when aircraft overhead. and if i reduced the gain manually again range is decreasing please please please help..

Do you have any pictures of the antennas? Can you describe how they were made?

[abcd567]

Guys please help me, i made nearly four antennas still no luck check this [ATTACH=CONFIG]3576[/ATTACH][ATTACH=CONFIG]3577[/ATTACH] too much noise and very less range more or less same for all antennas and antenna is on my roof with clear view of sky and i'm getting tired doing antenna since two weeks continuesly please help me. why is that disturbance and if i set gains to auto im getting very weak signal and can only get when aircraft overhead. and if i reduced the gain manually again range is decreasing please please please help..

1. Check also if you have a mobile/cell phone antenna close to your house. Strong signals from mobile/cell phone transmitter neaby may also cause this problem.

2. What is your setup? Are you using an amplifier? Better post Camera Pictures / sketch showing your setup to help forum members to find out the problem.

[charan]

There are no shorts or anything DSCN1186.jpg .. and there is DSCN1176.jpg this attachment and another near dongle DSCN1174.jpg and the antenna is DSCN1183.jpgDSCN1184.jpg and the dongle is good because i have 2 dongles both are working excellent for satellite pictures and some vhf frequencies so there is no problem with dongle i guess.. what should i do ?

[charan]

ill post any other details if you need made that antenna based on this design 1090_ant_02.JPG and 123.jpg here is the waterfall ..
and also some times only icao code shows up and vanishes is this common? even there are no other planes in vicinity !