Geez time to don my tinfoil hat so you can't track me lol

G'day Henning, I've giving up trying to setup the Beamfinder etc., in PP. I don't think we have enough radar sites to make it work here.

I noted your PP M6 location in the eastern suburbs and looking forward to seeing your contribution to the local MLAT fraternity.

The main add ons I find most useful is SBSPlotter, AD Lite and Mike Simpson's ACARS program.

Are you feeding ShipPlotter? I'm sharer "o0" and from my location feed the upper reaches of the Parramatta River and occasionally vessels around the Harbour Bridge and in Botany Bay. The SBS3 makes picking up the NMEA messages so much more convenient and not having to fiddle with setting up the sound card to decode the NMEA input.

With AD Lite (is it Active Display Lite?) I have the problem that it reports that BaseStation is not running when I am using PlanePlotter to access the SBS-3 directly. Do you have BaseStation running?

I have to google the ACARS program. Never heard of that before.

I don't feed ShipPlotter. I only receive messages from ships from time to time (rarely). So it's not worth spending 25 Euros on a software that shows them. I'm hoping that Kinetic will release a version of BaseStation that also shows the position of ships.

But you are right. The reception of both NMEA and ACARS messages is so much easier with the SBS-3. No need for additional receivers! I really love it!

I am proud to be able to say that I am an MLAT groundstation now on the PlanePlotter network! Have just been validated a couple of minutes ago.

Henning, have sent you a PM re setting up Active Display Lite with BaseStation and where to find Mike's ACARS program.

Grahame, any chance you might also request to become a master-user for 'qR' for the purpose of MLAT?

Unfortunately, the airnav radar box is not mlat capable. Something to do with an incompatible time stamp I think.

Ah, that would do it! Thanks Donald.


Henning, are you just using your GP1090 to receive AIS plots? Do you have a secondary antenna plugged into the the other SMA plug on the receiver?

Because you can purchase any decent Airband antenna to not only listen to ATC through the SBS3, but the same antenna will give you much better input signals for ACARS decoding and ship plots, all in one. Much better than a 1090mhz tuned antenna.

The SBS-3 comes with a throw out aerial for the AIS and ATC signals and I am using that one to receive the AIS plots. I know that I could buy a better one but to be honest I don't really need it. I can receive the plots of the ships that I can see outside my window and that's enough for me. I'm more interested in the planes :-)
And the throw out aerial isn't that bad anyway. Yesterday I received plots from a ship about 25NM away until it disappeared behind the horizon.

As the AriNav System polar plot is restricted to 300nm, my son wrote a Google based App where you can select the range you want. When I entend the
range out to 700nm, my polar plot looks like this. There is a definite straight line across the northeast, where the Brisbane-Auckland flights are being
tracked.

http://www.16right.com/MessageBoard/...ot20121020.jpg

Also interesting was the number of transmissions received since I setup the AirNav Systems RadarBox in March this year. My RadarBox has received
1,144,729,694 (1.1 Billion) transmissions, that's an average of 64 per second over this period. I have seen peaks of around 450 transmissions per second.