Thanks Nigel, much appreciated.

Hi Nigel

How doe the Car numbers work? Are they assigned daily, weekly? I have seen letters on the cars eg:

7CF450 Car L
7CF452 Car B

Cheers
Mark

Hi everyone,

I'm new here on the forum and I set up an ADS-B feeder less than a week ago with an RTL-SDR USB dongle. I'm using the dongle's stock antenna next to the window at my house in the southern suburbs of Sydney.

Unfortunately, the neighbours' houses block my line of sight to the NW and SE as the antenna's not up high enough, and there's a slight ridge for the 180 degrees in between those two compass points also. Between the other 180 degrees, however, my range is quite good, and I get reception out almost to Parkes, Young, Canberra and Moruya (around 275 km/150 nm). I'm surprised that the tiny bundled antenna pulls in signals from so far away. I've attached a screenshot from Virtual Radar Server with my range plot – each circle is 30 km.

My next step, hopefully, is to get the antenna onto the roof so that I can get unobstructed views in all directions. Unfortunately, getting a higher gain antenna is out of my budget at the moment.

I'm currently sharing in Planeplotter as 'jn' and on Flightaware as 'eastons'.

I have made a map using Google Earth (see attachment). :)

If anyone knows who ed, vl or xz are, I can add them to the map.

I'm not in Sydney but share ADS-B from Wagga.

I host a FR24 receiver (F-YSWG1) which has a great range for it to be located in a valley (~190 AMSL) and also picks up GND AC on the runway and on the taxiway (from the runway to around the disused control tower). I can't share the FR24 box data.

With FlightAware (YFDN), I've brought my RTL2832U/R820T USB dongle (using a DIY coax collinear antenna) back online with the use of a laptop but soon to be Raspberry Pi. The range is less (north is worse), a lot slower as well and doesn't pick-up GND.

I am vl.

Hi Mark,

Sorry, I missed seeing this until just now.

Each car was assigned a letter a few years ago, but when the Vee-Lo's were introduced, the cars were then assigned a specific car number. The Vee-Lo that pumps out the code for, say Car 66, is only found on one vehicle (Car P from memory). Car L is Car 72, Car B is Car 11 (I think).

The newest cars (new livery) have been allocated a car number, clearly seen on the side of the car and bonnet. However, if one of these cars goes off-airport for maintenance, we do have spare pre-programmed Vee-Lo's which are attached with magnets and powered off the 12V car charger points. This will be the only time when the Vee-Lo won't correspond with what car you're visually looking at, although you will see there's two Vee-Lo antenna on the roof of the car.

Hope this helps
Nigel

Hi Mike,

Sorry, I missed your post until now. I've updated the map to show your name. I've also filled in 'ed'. Only 'xz' remains unknown.

Edit: The thumbnail doesn't seem to load for me for some reason, but the full image works if you click on it.

Flightradar24 have sent me one of their receivers which I've now put on my roof. Even with only a few hours of runtime so far, I have significant coverage improvement compared to my DVB-t dongle.

I've had some hits in excess of 450 km (240 NM) away. My range now gets out to around Nambucca Heads, Port Macquarie, Armidale, about 100 km beyond Tamworth, about 50km beyond Narrabri, Coonamble, around 100 km beyond Dubbo, Condobolin, West Wyalong, Temora, Junee, Wagga Wagga, Tumut, about 50 km beyond Canberra, Jindabyne, Bombala and Eden.

My range out to sea isn't so good though - only about 250 km - as I have hills and high-rises blocking my view towards that direction. I don't have anything in the south-east yet either, but I think that's just because there haven't been any flights there yet. I am also getting ground coverage - I'm under 10 km from the airport.

I've attached an image of my range after a few hours of running the receiver. The rings are 50 km apart and the outermost ring is 450 km.