Upon moving into my new house, I noticed a curious wire snaking through the wall from outside and into one of the bedrooms. I made my way outside and followed the wire up to the roof. Wherein I found a monopole.
It turned out that the previous occupant was a HAM radio buff and I thought that perhaps I could re-use this setup with a simple RTL usb stick and track some planes!
my RTL SDR usb stick had died some years previously, so I purchased a new one and a couple of converters so I could attach the connector to the USB stick.
Within a few minutes I was tracking planes.
View my (extremely poor) range here on AirNav Radarbox
As you can see the range was poor, This was mostly due to the HAM radio fan using RG58 cable rather than the appropriate RG60 or other type of wiring, also who knows if that monopole was even rated for 1090Mhz? I decided to purchase a filter that included an active booster.
The seller indicated that the device was to receive 5V via the USB-C power port, which was easy for me to comply with – the raspberry pi running the whole show only outputs 5V over its USB ports.
I connected the active filter only to receive absolutely nothing. The filter just gets EXTREMELY HOT. Something I didn’t think would be possible with only 5V of power going through it.
Is it possible I bridged something and completely farked the filter? Possibly but not sure how.
[This post will be updated as the adventure continues, perhaps I will end up replacing the dodgy RG58 Cabling, perhaps another active filter will do the trick? who knows]