Improved piaware Reception

After running piaware on the RPi B+ for a few days I was reasonably pleased with the reception but wanted to have an antenna outdoors. It would have been a fairly difficult job to try waterproofing my home brew collinear so after a look round the web decided to order a TMRF-1090 from Taylor Made RF Ltd.

I fitted it to the top of my mast so it is just above the roof of my bungalow and connected it with Heliax half inch FSJ low loss coax which I had spare. The antenna is sturdily built and well finished. The simple instructions with it made it a doddle to fit together. The Heliax is very stiff so it goes as far as the entrance through the bungalow wall and then connects to RG213 the rest of the way with a short flexible link to the dongle.

    

Once connected up it was a case of seeing how much reception would have changed. Would the TMRF-1090 be worth the time, effort and money? I needn't have worried as can be seen by the increase in the numbers of aircraft tracked in the statistics from FlightAware:



A little video of real time tracking using piaware with FlightAware on the Raspberry Pi B+:

Raspberry Pi B+

I have looked at the Raspberry Pi on and off since it was first introduced but have only now got round to ordering one. As the B+ had recently been released that was what I went for. Along with the Pi I also have ordered a WiFi dongle and a camera.





Also ordered was a Tandy Multiface kit:



Previous experience of programming goes back a long way, mostly with various forms of BASIC. Sinclair BASIC on the ZX81 and ZX Spectrum, BBC BASIC on the BBC model B and GFA BASIC on the Atari ST so at least many of the structures are familiar though the remaining grey cell needs a good prodding to remember how to use them. I have reached the age where learning a new type of programming language is well and truly a very slow climb along a steep learning curve.

To date I now have two micro SD cards. One loaded with NOOBS which I have got working OK with WiFi and the camera.  The other was loaded with FUZE BASIC which works OK with WiFi but I am disappointed that there seems no way to access the camera from FUZE BASIC.