My Raspberry Pi ADS-B airplane tracker project has consumed quite a bit of my time over the last few months. I've had quite a few set backs with getting it configured but have managed to over come most of it so far. I am going to chronicle over many posts my current setup and configuration of the ADS-B Tracker and everything associated with it. A lot of my knowledge I've put together from reading online, and trial and error. My ultimate goal is to configure a self sufficient ADS-B tracker that can be placed onto a friend's radio tower that sits at about 2000' elevation.
This is my list of requirements/goals.
-Run local ADS-B Tracker screen
-Feed data to a number of websites. (ADSBExchange, FlightAware, FlightRadar24, and PlaneFinder.net)
-In a compact size possible
-Mount onto a Tower
-Solar Powered
These are just some of the requirements that I've set for myself. Now that I'm further in to the project I don't know if some of these are actually practical and I may be doing something different but that will come in a further update.
The equipment that I need seems reasonably straight forward.
-Raspberry Pi
-SDR Reciever
-Antenna
-Solar Panel
-Battery
-Mobile Hotspot
-Container
All of this seems pretty reasonable. I've never worked with some of these components but that is the point of this. To learn what I need to get this project up off the ground.
Wednesday, May 29, 2019
Friday, March 1, 2019
Fun and Adventure...
The last post I had written was a really struggling time with my genetic condition (PKU). I had a lot of doctors visits to go through. So in this post I want to give a bit of an update, kind of start posting about some of the projects I'm not working on and things of that nature.
Health wise:
Work stress was a big cause of that but now I'm no longer a one man operation again and that's subsided greatly. It's a wonder what work stress can do to your mood and motivations. So the last post I mentioned PEG-PAL it's now Palynziq and has been on the market for a few months. I had my first injection last week and this week I will have my second. It will take me some months before this becomes effective. The hope is that I will be able to eat normal food once it is in my system fully. It is a daily injection at that point and I'm hoping that I can keep with the regimen since I suck at taking medications. I'm on another medication for PKU as well that has helped with mood and other factors that relate to pre-Parkinson's.
Now for the fun and adventure part:
I've been doing some stuff with my ham radio projects off and on. Right now my station consists of a Yeasu FT-897d, a Toughbook running kubuntu on it, and a 40m home brew dipole that is currently packed away. I've not done anything on HF in a while but I did have some fun with JT65 and FT8 about a year or more ago now. I'm hoping for a nice windless day so I can use my cheapy drone I purchased to put up my antenna. I've also got Skyloop Antenna parts to homebrew another antenna which will hopefully cut down on the noise but I've had to work towards configuring the antenna tuner. I still have not done that so that's on my to-do list.
I got an Yeasu FT-2DR as well recently after having 3 Baofeng's I decided I wanted to upgrade. The radio is great, I just need to read more of the manual and practice with it. The Baofeng's are now for other projects.
I've also been playing a lot with Raspberry Pi's
Pi-Hole (Network wide Ad Blocker):
I have a few Pi's running right now, one is a Pi-Hole (https://www.pi-hole.net) This allows me to send advertisers DNS requests to a black hole. So I surf without any advertisements, and it also blocks my SmartTV from ads and tracking. It actually sped up the response of the TV when I did that and it's great. I probably should setup one for my family.
Pi-Aware (ADS-B airplane tracker):
I'm also running a Raspberry Pi with an ADS-B flight tracker. This allows me to track Aircraft over my house at any given time. I then feed that in to a few websites online. FlightAware, FlightRadar24, Planefinder.net and ADSBExchange. I plan on doing a series of posts on this project as it is right now my most favourite with a bunch of challenges that are easy to over come and learn something in the process.
Pi-Wolf (Raspberry Pi running Direwolf):
This is a bit of a tricky one for me. Direwolf is a software terminal node controller or TNC. This is needed for transmitting packets if you're interested in doing packet radio. I currently have one configured in my testing that will allow me to do APRS packets using a Baofeng without a problem. I've been trying to configure it to be useful for Winlink and a Baofeng but having hit a wall with that I've tabled it for a little while.
Besides this my biggest time sink has been gaming which gets in the way most of the time, however I'm slowly getting bored of anyway. Anyway that's pretty much it for this update if anyone has any questions about my projects please feel free to reach out to me.
One day at a time...
This was written as a draft back in July 2016. I'm going to publish it now and follow up with an update on what I've got going on at the moment.
.. seems as thought that is all I can manage at this point. I've been struggling with sleep and not getting enough during work nights to the point I have no energy during the day. Concentration has gone out the window and trying to eat enough food and take my medication has been an issue. It always is. I just hope that at some point that I won't feel the way I do on a day to day basis.
When the weekend rolls around I end up doing absolutely nothing and it kind of bothers me because of the lack of energy I have. I worry about people getting upset with me because I can't get up and find any sort of motivation to do normal household tasks or chores. I don't feel anything emotionally. I just kind of feel numb to most everything, no real joy or excitement, or sense of accomplishment when I take part in things. So I just end up doing nothing most of the time.
Obviously it's depression and failing to take my kuvan regularly. Why taking medication is such a struggle for me I don't know it has always been that way. All I am hoping for at this point in my life is for PEG-PAL to help me get over this. I don't even care about eating normal food I just don't want to have to feel this lack of emotions. I have a lot of things that I would like to accomplish or do with my various hobbies but that drive and sense of motivation is completely lacking.
.. seems as thought that is all I can manage at this point. I've been struggling with sleep and not getting enough during work nights to the point I have no energy during the day. Concentration has gone out the window and trying to eat enough food and take my medication has been an issue. It always is. I just hope that at some point that I won't feel the way I do on a day to day basis.
When the weekend rolls around I end up doing absolutely nothing and it kind of bothers me because of the lack of energy I have. I worry about people getting upset with me because I can't get up and find any sort of motivation to do normal household tasks or chores. I don't feel anything emotionally. I just kind of feel numb to most everything, no real joy or excitement, or sense of accomplishment when I take part in things. So I just end up doing nothing most of the time.
Obviously it's depression and failing to take my kuvan regularly. Why taking medication is such a struggle for me I don't know it has always been that way. All I am hoping for at this point in my life is for PEG-PAL to help me get over this. I don't even care about eating normal food I just don't want to have to feel this lack of emotions. I have a lot of things that I would like to accomplish or do with my various hobbies but that drive and sense of motivation is completely lacking.
Tuesday, May 10, 2016
Time for my yearly update
It's kind of odd I go through these spurts where I don't write anything then feel like I need to update my blog again.
So this year 2016 has gone a lot better so far than 2015 has for me. Health wise I feel like I've gotten over my depressive slump but it has been a long road with that. I'm off the stupid anti-depressants and on prescription dopamine. Since I have PKU my body can't produce it so I'm having minor Parkinson's like symptoms. It's greatly improved my mood, motivation, and fatigue issues that I have. The whole point of a low pro PKU diet is to avoid brain damage. I had an MRI and my brain doesn't have any damage, which is quite important as 93% of PKU adults have some form of physical brain damage. So whatever I'm doing is going right.
I no longer where where I used to, after they asked me to watch a guy pee in a cup for a drug test when I'm IT it was time for me to go. I had already applied for another job and ended up getting that so I'm now in a much better position and the important thing is I'm working with a team doing some of the same kind of stuff I always do. I can't ever focus on one thing and end up doing a bunch of various different tasks even though I'm now a Programmer Analyst. It's more like a sysadmin position but whatever.
Dayton is coming up and I'll be going to it again this year, I wasn't sure if I wanted to and I'm hoping my joints all function so I can avoid some bone pain. I'm looking at getting a proper antenna, rather than a homebrew since I can't seem to make them quite right and don't have the tools to do so. Then I'm also looking at an antenna tuner as another option.
Anyway signing off for now.
Friday, May 29, 2015
It's been a year since my last post O_o
Update: I have no idea what happened to the formatting but correcting it.
It has been a while since I've posted, over a year now. I'll try to give a brief update but I really kind of miss writing on this medium. It has been rather difficult to pry myself away from the computer games. Like Kerbal Space Program, plus dealing with my medical issues I've just let this slide.
It's kind of hard to think back and remember what you've done over the past year and post anything positive and entertaining. Mostly it's lost in a mental fog due to depression and my PKU which causes/contributes to my depression. I have lost two of my uncles with in the span of a few months from each other. Both due to complications for medical issues. Which really upset me quite a bit to be honest. Since I'm from Wales and live in the US, and grew up here I feel disconnected, out of place, when it comes to my family and family history.
Well I got back from Dayton again this year. So that's my second time I've gone. My wife and I had a good time we started at the Columbus Zoo, and then Dayton. Ended up walking around for about 3 days. Due to a tailbone injury my right hip was killing me by the end. However when I went to pack away our new tent my hip popped and it hasn't felt really bad at all since. At Dayton I had a pretty good time this year, went to a lot of forums, met up with a few friends to socialize but I didn't pick up much of anything. Only got a MFJ Discone which is what I was really after anyway to work with some SDR projects. I really need to get my station sorted out, but one project leads to another project and so on and I still haven't gotten my station sorted out the way I would like it to be. I've been made Field Day Captain for doing satellite work. Which should be kind of interesting but I don't have an antenna yet so I'll have to build one. I don't think it will be too hard.
I have not done a thing with Bitcoin in the last year than bought at random $10 worth of btc on coinbase. I've been more involved in Amateur Radio than anything else. I probably won't be doing any more Bitcoin videos on youtube anymore but they have been my most successful videos by far. Perhaps I'll do a final update video or something.
Anyway I'm going to sign off from here now. I will probably be posting a bit more frequently but they will more than likely be strange dreams that I have. From time to time I get extremely interesting and vivid dreams, that I really would like to write down. So I'll post them here.
It has been a while since I've posted, over a year now. I'll try to give a brief update but I really kind of miss writing on this medium. It has been rather difficult to pry myself away from the computer games. Like Kerbal Space Program, plus dealing with my medical issues I've just let this slide.
It's kind of hard to think back and remember what you've done over the past year and post anything positive and entertaining. Mostly it's lost in a mental fog due to depression and my PKU which causes/contributes to my depression. I have lost two of my uncles with in the span of a few months from each other. Both due to complications for medical issues. Which really upset me quite a bit to be honest. Since I'm from Wales and live in the US, and grew up here I feel disconnected, out of place, when it comes to my family and family history.
Well I got back from Dayton again this year. So that's my second time I've gone. My wife and I had a good time we started at the Columbus Zoo, and then Dayton. Ended up walking around for about 3 days. Due to a tailbone injury my right hip was killing me by the end. However when I went to pack away our new tent my hip popped and it hasn't felt really bad at all since. At Dayton I had a pretty good time this year, went to a lot of forums, met up with a few friends to socialize but I didn't pick up much of anything. Only got a MFJ Discone which is what I was really after anyway to work with some SDR projects. I really need to get my station sorted out, but one project leads to another project and so on and I still haven't gotten my station sorted out the way I would like it to be. I've been made Field Day Captain for doing satellite work. Which should be kind of interesting but I don't have an antenna yet so I'll have to build one. I don't think it will be too hard.
I have not done a thing with Bitcoin in the last year than bought at random $10 worth of btc on coinbase. I've been more involved in Amateur Radio than anything else. I probably won't be doing any more Bitcoin videos on youtube anymore but they have been my most successful videos by far. Perhaps I'll do a final update video or something.
Anyway I'm going to sign off from here now. I will probably be posting a bit more frequently but they will more than likely be strange dreams that I have. From time to time I get extremely interesting and vivid dreams, that I really would like to write down. So I'll post them here.
Thursday, May 22, 2014
Just got back from Dayton Hamvention
So in my newest hobby of Amateur Radio I decided that I was going to go to "The" convention for Amateur Radio and that was Dayton. It was my first experience with it and the forums were pretty good and had a lot of different topics. I had a whole list of ones that I wanted to do initially but ended up just only going to two of them.
My wife and I left on Thursday and ended up tent camping. Although this year it was raining almost every day and got down to 35 degrees at night in the tent. So needless to say we were both freezing. Ended up having to buy another sleeping bag, doubling up on socks stuffed with "hot hands" to keep us warm.
Most of is it is vendors showing off their technology and selling it. However outside is the flea market. I ended up enjoying those quite a bit because you never know what you're going to see. A lot of what you see, even at some of the smaller ones, is government surplus equipment. I have to say I enjoy the flea market part a bit more because you can get some stuff you wouldn't otherwise be able to. Most everything else I can just order online and have shipped to my house.
I managed to pick up some pretty interesting gear whilst I was there. I saw a mount for my CF-19 Toughbook, except they wanted $50 for it. I should have just offered $30 for it right there because after thinking about it and going back it was gone. However, it did lead me to 3 Kontron mobile computers that were most likely in police cruisers. I got them for $10 each so if nothing else the thing will be a good project box.
The units I got were a Kontron CVX-Server Model 300-166, and so far I can't seem to find anything on them. So I'm guessing they have been discontinued. It looks like they have about a 1.8 ghz cpu processor in them and I think if I can load linux onto them then they'll work pretty well. The question is what do I want to use them for? I'm thinking ham radio something. Perhaps a deploy-able unit with a mesh node. As you can see from the picture it looks like it has some pretty good cooling methods on it. So all I need to do is sort out power to this thing and it will be up and going. At any rate, I did some more digging on these and found the data sheet on them. Which will help me immensely in figuring out what I want to do with them.
That's my adventure in Dayton and not sure if I will go next year but I can at least say I've been once. Once I figure out the state of these computers I'll make an update on what I'm using them for.
My wife and I left on Thursday and ended up tent camping. Although this year it was raining almost every day and got down to 35 degrees at night in the tent. So needless to say we were both freezing. Ended up having to buy another sleeping bag, doubling up on socks stuffed with "hot hands" to keep us warm.
Most of is it is vendors showing off their technology and selling it. However outside is the flea market. I ended up enjoying those quite a bit because you never know what you're going to see. A lot of what you see, even at some of the smaller ones, is government surplus equipment. I have to say I enjoy the flea market part a bit more because you can get some stuff you wouldn't otherwise be able to. Most everything else I can just order online and have shipped to my house.
I managed to pick up some pretty interesting gear whilst I was there. I saw a mount for my CF-19 Toughbook, except they wanted $50 for it. I should have just offered $30 for it right there because after thinking about it and going back it was gone. However, it did lead me to 3 Kontron mobile computers that were most likely in police cruisers. I got them for $10 each so if nothing else the thing will be a good project box.The units I got were a Kontron CVX-Server Model 300-166, and so far I can't seem to find anything on them. So I'm guessing they have been discontinued. It looks like they have about a 1.8 ghz cpu processor in them and I think if I can load linux onto them then they'll work pretty well. The question is what do I want to use them for? I'm thinking ham radio something. Perhaps a deploy-able unit with a mesh node. As you can see from the picture it looks like it has some pretty good cooling methods on it. So all I need to do is sort out power to this thing and it will be up and going. At any rate, I did some more digging on these and found the data sheet on them. Which will help me immensely in figuring out what I want to do with them.
That's my adventure in Dayton and not sure if I will go next year but I can at least say I've been once. Once I figure out the state of these computers I'll make an update on what I'm using them for.
Wednesday, May 7, 2014
Feild Day Mesh Network - Antenna, Distance, and Checking signal strength
I recently went out to our site, where Field Day will take place, with a few of our club members to see about how we are going to setup logging. A few of them are bringing RV's and things like that and so we need a way to network our systems together.
The preferred logging software is N1MM Logger which works rather well on PC, and seems to do "ok" under wine on Linux. The challenge is getting the data feeds from the internet and sharing them out amongst our dispersed stations. So I thought this is a great place to show case mesh net, and play around and see how it works in a real test environment.
To run my test I brought with me my laptop running a linux program called iwScanner that works in python. It works amazingly well, if you're looking for something on windows then I recommend ViStumbler. Unfortunately it doesn't work on Linux.
I also brought with me two routers to test out and the first one looked like the signal was going up and down. I ended up switching to the other one. We got out to probably about 300 or 400 yards with a -80 or so db in signal. Which I think would still put stuff through just not very fast. This was however just a router with it's stock antenna, chucked into the rafters and through light trees.
I think that's pretty promising that we will be able to connect these together. So when I got home I decided I was going to build a Omni directional Collinear antenna. Following the directions from Marty Bug's website (Which is a great resource for all wifi antenna design) I set out to build one. I wanted to get the most db gain possible so I just cut a super long piece of wire and started with that. It's about 5' long and I had a bit of trouble placing it into a electrical conduit (pvc). As a result the loops on the antenna probably got shrunk and I wouldn't be surprised if it is a bit twisted up inside.
With the stock antenna on my mesh node I got about -17 to -22 db. With the one I created I get a steady -33. Now this is only preliminary tests and I have some modifications to the end of the antenna to try out. Also because it is a lot bigger the vertical beamwidth is smaller. So I probably have to try it upright and a bit farther away. Otherwise I'm back to the drawing board on the omni wifi antenna.
The next antenna that I'm going to build is either a bi-quad antenna or a quad-quad antenna, which can also be found on Marty's website. Also with this design at some point I plan to install it onto a dish to give it a bit more gain and direction.
Field Day isn't until the end of June so I definitely have quite a bit of time to get these solutions up and going. Of course it doesn't help when I plug in 48 volts power supply into one of my only 2 12volt rated nodes and just about catch it on fire.
At some point I'll post some pictures.
The preferred logging software is N1MM Logger which works rather well on PC, and seems to do "ok" under wine on Linux. The challenge is getting the data feeds from the internet and sharing them out amongst our dispersed stations. So I thought this is a great place to show case mesh net, and play around and see how it works in a real test environment.
To run my test I brought with me my laptop running a linux program called iwScanner that works in python. It works amazingly well, if you're looking for something on windows then I recommend ViStumbler. Unfortunately it doesn't work on Linux.
I also brought with me two routers to test out and the first one looked like the signal was going up and down. I ended up switching to the other one. We got out to probably about 300 or 400 yards with a -80 or so db in signal. Which I think would still put stuff through just not very fast. This was however just a router with it's stock antenna, chucked into the rafters and through light trees.
I think that's pretty promising that we will be able to connect these together. So when I got home I decided I was going to build a Omni directional Collinear antenna. Following the directions from Marty Bug's website (Which is a great resource for all wifi antenna design) I set out to build one. I wanted to get the most db gain possible so I just cut a super long piece of wire and started with that. It's about 5' long and I had a bit of trouble placing it into a electrical conduit (pvc). As a result the loops on the antenna probably got shrunk and I wouldn't be surprised if it is a bit twisted up inside.
With the stock antenna on my mesh node I got about -17 to -22 db. With the one I created I get a steady -33. Now this is only preliminary tests and I have some modifications to the end of the antenna to try out. Also because it is a lot bigger the vertical beamwidth is smaller. So I probably have to try it upright and a bit farther away. Otherwise I'm back to the drawing board on the omni wifi antenna.
The next antenna that I'm going to build is either a bi-quad antenna or a quad-quad antenna, which can also be found on Marty's website. Also with this design at some point I plan to install it onto a dish to give it a bit more gain and direction.
Field Day isn't until the end of June so I definitely have quite a bit of time to get these solutions up and going. Of course it doesn't help when I plug in 48 volts power supply into one of my only 2 12volt rated nodes and just about catch it on fire.
At some point I'll post some pictures.
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