W8EMV - Whiskey Eight Echo Mike Victor

checklist for a refresh of my PiAware ADS-B feeder

I'm in the midst of downloading a fresh copy of PiAware to run as the ADS-B feeder on a Raspberry Pi 2. The Pi has a Flightaware branded RTL-SDR tuner stick and a Nooelec 1090 MHz antenna in a window facing to the east towards Detroit Metro Airport (KDTW). It currently also picks up good traffic to and from Ann Arbor Municipal Airport (KARB) and Willow Run Airport (KYIP).

A checklist for me to get the new system up and running.

1. Follow the instructions at Do you want to build your own FlightAware PiAware ADS-B Ground Station? for the basic software build, configuration settings, and to claim the device once it's live at Flightaware.

2. Follow the directions at Optional steps for advanced setup to configure login and password, SSH access, SD card filesystem size, and to confirm system status.

3. When running, configure your location with some precision so that MLAT will work.

4. Wait for daylight so there's actually some airplane traffic to calibrate against.

5. Create my usual admin account on systems, clean up SSH access so that it can be done with keys (this one is being stubborn), and make sure that all packages are up to date.

6. Install Tailscale for remote VPN access and set up DNS alias for the 'piaware' machine.

7. Add additional flight feeders to send flight data to other systems in addition to Flightaware.

My old system was running HypriotOS based on Debian Jessie (Debian 8) which is end of life this summer, so it's high time to redo it. I'm looking forward to that new SD card wiping out some accumulated configuration crud as well. The current machine had a 400+ day uptime streak but it's been a bit more flaky of late and the hope is that a new image will give a fresh start.

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Subsequent notes.

MLAT took a long time to sync, partially I'm sure due to the very low levels of traffic.

I'll do a separate post about additional flight feeders.

W8UM U of Michigan Amateur Radio Club net, 2020-05-17

Thirteen stations, 26 minutes on the Sunday night 8:00 p.m. net on 145.23- and W8UM/R on Echolink.

One nice thing about this net is that it goes pretty quickly to leave time for another net (ARPSC) that happens at 8:30 p.m. Lots of brief reports tonight that made you want to learn more.

The beaches are reopening in Hawaii. Bird watching in Ann Arbor is better than usual with blue jays and orioles in evidence. Yesterday was good for mountain bike riding. Local rhubarb is in the market. The Blue Angels did a very brief flyover. The trees are getting green. Getting ready for what will be an unusual Field Day. A power supply needed repair or replacement, but worked OK on low power. New FT8 software has a release candidate, which works great so far.

I joke with my family that this is the "fix your radio hour", and that was in evidence as it is every time - it wouldn't be a proper net without someone overcoming a temporary obstacle.

I listened on my Baofeng UV-5R and then shifted over to the setup I have with a Pi 4 running Ubuntu 20.04 and rtl_tcp, feeding Gqrx on my MacBook Air. The rtl_tcp setup introduces a few seconds of software-defined delay compared to the radio hardware, and it's nice to watch the spectrum go by as you listen.

Thanks to Pat WA4DSR for taking net control.

librtlsdr and zero-copy support on Ubuntu 20.04 + arm64 + Pi 4

The patch at 81833a1c is necessary on an arm64 system running librtlsdr-dev, otherwise you get the error

Reading samples in async mode... Allocating 15 zero-copy buffers Killed

This is fixed in Debian Sid in a version labelled 0.6.0-3. Unfortunately, there is also a Ubuntu 20.04 version of the library also labelled 0.6.0-3 which has the bug - noted on Launchpad as 1876624.

The workaround I did was to install the .deb file from Sid on top of my Ubuntu 20.04 installation, which I hope to undo as soon as I can. It also worked to build that library from source.

Other than that, my experience with Ubuntu 20.04 on the Pi 4 running arm64 has been just fine. I'm looking forward to updating the rest of my Pi menagerie, some of which is stuck on old Debian Jessie.