Receiver

I use USB DVB+T/TV/FM dongle containing Realtek chip R820T.
There are several chips used in such dongles:

• Rafael Micro R820T/828T
• E4000
• FC0012 - not usable, avoid it because it doesn't cover 1090MHz
• FC0013

Antenna

I started experiments with antenna included with the dongle in the package.

I'm not at all the guy who undestand the magic behind the electromagnetic waves even more to design an antennas. I foolowed instructions from source (see below) at least to check if I'm able to create "simple" antenna.

Some basic math backgroung for antenna parameter:

lambda = speed of the light (c) / frequency
lambda = 299 792 458 / 1 090 000 000
lambda = 275mm

The antena is devided into odd count of the segments. The length of the segment is half of the lambda. You have to also count velocity factor but I used pure copper wire for which is velocity factor more or less 1. So, length of the segment is 130mm for 1090MHz.

To simplify the antenna construction I used just straigth wire, 650mm long to create 3 segments straigth and with two loops each 130mm long in between. The loops (40mm in diameter) have to be outside of the centre of the wire.

BNC__________O_____________O____________  

Installing/running software

I use dump1090-fa to visualize the aircrafts. For the installation I used following steps:

I use 4GB SD card to install Raspbian with following command:

sudo dd if=2019-09-26-raspbian-buster-lite.img of=/dev/sda bs=1M conv=sync

Note: paramater bs=4M didnt work for my, during PI boot the kernel crashed

Disable DVB RTL driver

echo "blacklist dvb-usb-rtl28xxu" >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-rtl28xxu.conf

Install necessary packages and download dump1090-fa

sudo apt update
sudo apt-get install build-essential debhelper librtlsdr-dev pkg-config dh-systemd libncurses5-dev libbladerf-dev lighttpd
wget https://github.com/flightaware/dump1090/archive/v3.7.2.tar.gz

Extract dump1090-fa and install it:

tar xvfz v3.7.2.tar.gz
cd dump1090-v3.7.2
dpkgbuild-package -b
cd ..
sudo dpkg -i dump1090-fa_3.7.2_armhf.deb

Adjusting location in the config file

sudo vi /etc/default/dump1090-fa
RECEIVER_OPTIONS=.... --lat aa.aaaa --lon bb.bbbb"

And finaly reboot to see if it is working properly

reboot

Aaaaaand open web browser on http://a.b.c.d/dump1090-fa/. It works perfectly.

Source websites

https://www.sprut.de/electronic/pic/projekte/adsb/adsb_en.html