ADS-B Weather and Traffic for less than $120

[x3 skier]

There's a very long thread about this on the Pilots of America Board.

http://www.pilotsofamerica.com/forum/sh ... hp?t=85058

Cheers

[Gripdana]

I got all the parts. Followed the directions and tested it out. The foreflight recognized the wifi and appears to be working. I will test it in the air this weekend. It took about 30 minutes total including the download time for the firmware.

[Sonex1517]

I have found the suggested battery pack does not power the Rasberry Pi and it reboots nearly constantly. Running it off the USB plug in the Sonex seems reliable.

[andrewp]

I flew this in our non-Sonex project aircraft on the weekend and it rocked. I used a $30 battery pack with a Solar panel on it just because it was handy to charge my phone too. Worked wonderfully for weather/nexrad. Yet to see any traffic with it, but that might be user error.

[wlarson861]

My parts came today and I assembled everything in a few minutes. Hardest part was the imaging software. Had to run as administrator to get it to load. Then had to borrow a USB plug in SD card reader as the program would not recognize the built in SD card slot. Once the SD card was imaged I fired it up and hooked up to the WiFi on the Ipad and opened Foreflight. Saw the Free flight 0 towers message so I guess it works. Will try to get it air born soon and give it a test. I hooked up the battery pack that came with the kit and it powers everything fine. Robbie, I wonder if you have a bad battery pack or cord.

[andrewp]

FYI: The main forum for the latest on stratux:

https://www.reddit.com/r/stratux/

AP

[Gripdana]

I took it up and flew with the raspberry on sunday. Was getting 2 towers. There was no traffic or weather and there was none in the area. I will be flying down into Los Angeles on saturday so I hope to see a lot of targets. We don't get much weather so I won't see much of that.

[nwawingman]

Here is the link to the EAA article about building this device.

http://www.eaa.org/en/eaa/aviation-communities-and-interests/homebuilt-aircraft-and-homebuilt-aircraft-kits/resources-for-while-youre-building/building-articles/instruments-and-avionics/live-weather-and-traffic-for-less-than-$120

I also found a video that has some useful information showing the building process and connection to ForeFlight.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rEOJrw4ds8

Don't make the mistake I made when trying to install the software to the SD card. The file must be extracted before using the utility that copies the file to the card. Mine looks like it is working now. Time to take it flying to see for sure. I will be interested to see if it will work with ForeFlight on my Iphone as well as the Ipad.

[Daviator]

Please be careful using units like this for traffic avoidance. You will not get traffic unless there is another aircraft in your area that has a compliant ADS-B system and is activating the ADS-B transmission tower. Since the system you are using is receive only, not broadcast, you will not receive traffic specifically for your aircraft or direction of flight. In addition the system only sends traffic information that is relative to the aircraft that is activating the tower and only traffic that is 15 nm horizontally and 3500 ft vertically from that aircraft. So if you are not flying in the same direction and altitude of the aircraft that is activating the tower you will not see all of the traffic in your area. I can not stress enough how dangerous this can be if you are using it as a traffic avoidance device. Weather is constantly broadcast through the ADS-B system and is a great resource to all pilots.

http://www.aopa.org/News-and-Video/All- ... -B-seminar

And in case you didn't know starting January 1st 2016 the FAA will not allow ADS-B towers to broadcast traffic to aircraft with ADS-B out transmitters that don't meet at least a SIL 1 performance level of positional accuracy. This will lower even more the amount of aircraft that can activate an ADS-B tower for traffic broadcast.

Be careful out there!

[andrewp]

I think it is worth it just for the weather/nexrad alone. I have yet to see anything on traffic. With two antennas I will be curious to see what else I see, (eg: not just rebroadcast on UAT), but traffic at best is a "well, that is better than nothing".