For some time I’ve been using a discone antenna a few metres above the house roof with around 15m of good quality coax feeding a Pro Stick Plus with reasonable but not great results.
I recently decided to upgrade, replacing the discone with a FlightAware aerial and a Rtl SDR-Radio Blog filtered LNA a few metres from the antenna. The original 15m coax still delivers the amplified signals to the receiver.
First of all the Pro stick plus had to go as its internal LNA was now being swamped with too much signal, so my RTL V3 dongle took its place with some improvement.
Despite running the dongle at 0db gain, aircraft taking off a few miles away were still dropping out so this was eventually fixed by inserting a 20db attenuator at the dongle end of the coax.
The system is working fine and is much better than the original setup, but there is clearly a trade off between reliable decoding of strong local signals and getting higher message counts with longer range which is presumably down to the dynamic range the dongle is capable of handling.
I wonder if anyone has progressed to alternatives such as the Airspy and managed better local and distant reception.
I recently decided to upgrade, replacing the discone with a FlightAware aerial and a Rtl SDR-Radio Blog filtered LNA a few metres from the antenna. The original 15m coax still delivers the amplified signals to the receiver.
First of all the Pro stick plus had to go as its internal LNA was now being swamped with too much signal, so my RTL V3 dongle took its place with some improvement.
Despite running the dongle at 0db gain, aircraft taking off a few miles away were still dropping out so this was eventually fixed by inserting a 20db attenuator at the dongle end of the coax.
The system is working fine and is much better than the original setup, but there is clearly a trade off between reliable decoding of strong local signals and getting higher message counts with longer range which is presumably down to the dynamic range the dongle is capable of handling.
I wonder if anyone has progressed to alternatives such as the Airspy and managed better local and distant reception.
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