After getting my Raspberry Pi-based ADS-B receiver up and running earlier in the summer, I've been taking things a bit further with it. Some of the changes I've made have been hardware upgrades designed to improve both the range and reliability of the system, while others have been focused on finding uses for the data I'm collecting.

On the hardware side of things, as promised, I've swapped out the original whip antenna for a much larger 1090MHz antenna. While the antenna is technically designed for the top of a pole, I'm not planning on drilling holes in my roof, so it's instead duct-taped to the inside of a window at the back of my home, facing roughly north. It certainly has made a big difference, almost doubling range and improving reception for local traffic, including the helicopters up and down the river.

With a new antenna, range and accuracy is significantly improved, tracking aircraft nearly 200 miles away.

I've also taken advantage of recent changes in the Raspberry Pi 4 firmware to move away from running on an SD card and I'm instead using a 240GB M.2 SSD stick and a USB 3.0 adapter. By switching the Pi configuration to supporting USB boot, I've removed the risk of SD card failure (my original card wore out after just 3 months of operation, entailing a complete reinstall and reconfiguration) and also given the Pi a performance boost. Getting the SSD configured was the easiest part of the transition, as I found a script to handle cloning the drive for me.

Booting a 240GB SSD on a Raspberry Pi 4.

Finally, I switched from a simple fanless aluminium heatsink case to the more sophisticated Argon One case, which moves ports to a more sensible layout and adds a software-controlled fan alongside using its case as a built-in heatsink. It also offers a power button, which controls the power state of the device. As I'm running my Pi headless and feeding aircraft data to multiple ADS-B services, I've set the case's power-state jumper to automatically turn on if there's a power failure (and connected its PSU to a Wi-Fi-enabled power socket if I need to remotely restart the device if I can't use secure shell to login). I've liked this case so much, I've also used it for another Raspberry Pi that I use as a Linux desktop PC.

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That all adds up to a much more powerful and more reliable ADS-B receiver. From a back window in London, I'm tracking aircraft nearly 200 nautical miles away and getting data for much of the helicopter traffic up and down the Thames low-flying corridor