In a previous communication about Tattershall I said that I had heard that the RAF Typhoon display pilot was going to practice his display. This sort of information is publicly available through NOTAMS, Notices To Airmen. There are websites that give this information in map form. Basically if a crane is erected or there are runway issues or events coming up that might affect flying then information about that thing is posted to NATS.
Typhoon NOTAM
This is the Typhoon NOTAM with information about where and when. That way, if you are planning to fly there you can avoid CGY.
Here’s what the pilot had to say about his display:
Well another great #phoonfriday for me to end the week. The fighter didn’t fancy it this morning despite the perfect weather but the family model was very keen this afternoon so that’s 1500ft complete! Roll on 1000ft next week….. 🤞🏼☀🚀 happy weekend all! 😎
He went up in a two seater so I wonder if he was being assessed. I remember being at Linton-On-Ouse when the Tucano display pilot was having his assessment to get his display ticket for the season, you could hear the engine pulling the plane in high-g turns just above the airfield. It was very impressive.
I am currently working on the Raspberry Pi I have installed in the loft as a web server and aircraft spotter. It’s been a while since I mentioned it here. I thought I’d just chuck up some images.
Aircraft Tracked
This picture gives an idea of how many aircraft can be tracked at once. Be aware this was early on a Sunday morning.
Radar Splat
This splat shows how far away aircraft are detected. Please note I am not where the blue dot is, that would be quite weird. The smallest locus is up to 9,999 ft, the green is 10,000 to 19,999 ft, the purple is the 20,000s and the red is above FL300.
May 28 2017 was a good day. I travelled to Duxford Airfield in Cambridgeshire for one of their airshows. Now, I’ve been to Duxford a lot and have taken some lovely photographs. I discuss my favourite birds here and more photographs are here. You can just search in that little box just over to the right.
The Imperial War Museum at Duxford is so large that it takes more than a day to see everything and that’s without a flying display to watch. I only zoomed around the hangers and static aircraft, paused at the Bloodhound replica, and then watched the gorgeous displays.
Of the static aircraft on display some were open for a walk through, I visited all of these:
Concorde
Hermes
York
Comet
Ambassador
Viscount
Britannia
VC10
Trident
One-Eleven
Herald
Of the flying aircraft, I was most impressed with the Typhoon, Rafale, Bronco and the Autogyro. All of these exhibited remarkable agility, they were stunning to watch. It was very good to see a Typhoon display for my first time along with the Rafale too. The Bronco is iconic and looked lovely. Even the World War 1 display wasn’t boring!
Bristol Britannia
Old and New
Dassault Rafale
Catalina
The Blades Display Team
Explosion
Luftwaffe Bronco
Red Devils
Typhoon
Wingwalkers
B-17
AAC Apache
If you don’t find the Catalina gorgeous then you aren’t into planes.
The weather was really hot for the day and the storms went either side of Duxford so we didn’t get wet. I had paid for a ticket upgrade so there was a marquee with tables and chairs where we sat. Along with posh portaloos and a seating area outside just by the tower this proved to be a worthwhile investment. Well worth doing as I could dump stuff and walk around with just the camera.
The photos above are a selection from the over 400 that were taken on the day. My challenge next time is to get the colours showing on the aircraft more when they are flying. Photographs of just silhouettes aren’t that interesting.
I am aware that in some places on the internet caturday is a thing. I do not care for this. Nor do I care for cute dog picture stuff. It’s quite boring, especially when associated with a meme [a word now misused]. There is a smaller, some might say darker, part of the internet where comparing the range of an ADS-B receiver is a thing. These are called “splats” and so here is my Splaturday picture.
There are other communications cover this sort of thing here and here.
I spent a couple of days recently in the area of this island called East Anglia. I grew up in a part of East Anglia although it was more of a London over spill than anything else, not really “proper” East Anglia. We did have two television aerials on the house and we could pick up not only Anglia TV but also London TV if we switched the aerials over. Occasionally there was something on Anglia which was better than the London stuff. It’s a bit like news in the South East, it’s all London based.
East Anglia is mostly flat and so has many old air force bases and a few current ones. So I watched some F15s land at RAF Lakenheath, which is really a USAF base. I observed a C-130 on approach in to RAF Mildenhall and I also saw about four Tornados land along with a Typhoon perform a touch and go at RAF Marham.
Before seeing the jets at RAF Marham I spent a few hours at Oxburgh Hall in Oxborough nearby the base. The sound of the RAF planes performing landings was wonderful at the Hall, the sound of those engines filled the air. I have a feeling the noise was due to the direction the planes turned while burning off energy. A great sound.
Oxburgh Hall
Oxburgh Hall
Oxburgh Hall
Oxburgh Hall
Above are some of my best shots of Oxburgh Hall.
I had dinner in Ely close to the cathedral, the Ship Of The Fens. It’s an impressive beast that rises out of the fens like a ship over the sea. It’s well worth a visit.
Ship Of The Fens
A very interesting place within the Fens is Wicken Fen. It’s a National trust place and is an area of this island that is unique within the fens themselves. Although not the best weather the visit was good with information about the history of the Fens. I also went on a small electric boat trip along Wicken Lode, a lode being a waterway in this part of the country.
This is an update on the ADS-B device. I have written about this in the previous two communications, here and here. So, on Tuesday 2nd August the Raspberry Pi arrived. Since then I have been setting it all up so the receiver is no longer dependent on the PC being on.
The first thing was to install the correct OS on the Pi. The picture shows it in initial phase with monitor, ethernet, keyboard and mouse all connected. Once the OS was installed I had to tell it to not load the GUI and just run a command line. Then, I got it connected to the network and pretty much removed all the cables apart from power.
I can connect to the Pi using SSH and run script from the command line. Next phase was to load the USB stick drivers and software. This was reasonable. Next up was the ADS-B reading software, installing and getting it running seemed easy enough and then I had to adjust some code to make sure this service starts up from boot. Next software to load was the MLAT server program, this was easy enough although initially I couldn’t quite find the correct code to check it was running.
Then, the whole set up was tested in the dining room window.
Today has been the task of moving the unit to the loft. I didn’t have any power sockets up there so one had to be installed and that took the time! Once that was done the system just needed to be secured onto the main beam in the loft. The important thing is to keep the length of the cable from aerial to dongle as short as possible, this increases the signal going into the Pi. The loft set up has been tested and it is running fine.
I have access to the Pi either via the PC using a program called PuTTY or the iPhone using an SSH connection. I can shut down the Pi remotely and monitor the internal temperature of the device. It is running at a range of 50-60 Celsius. Using a Pi to run this software is a bit like taking a sledgehammer to a walnut. But, it is independent and runs remotely. I am happy this procedure was reasonably straight forward!
The next stage is to get a more specialist aerial and maybe a more specific USB Dongle. However, this is one of those things where the amount of money you spend can be unlimited. You know, I could just install a radar up in the loft. However, here is the current splat for the range of the aircraft from my ADS-B receiver.
Loft Splat
Now that I’ve been reading a bit more about this type of thing I can explain a little more. ADS-B is broadcast by many aircraft and they send this on 1090MHz. These are the signals I receive in the loft and can see on my Virtual Radar Server software. I also send these signals over the internet to a new “radar” website. The ADS-B signals contain bits of information about position and heading, these are sent to a server which can determine positions of other aircraft by using time differences between signals arriving, this is called MultiLateration or MLAT. My Pi is part of this network allowing Radar360 to “see” more aircraft than just ADS-B alone.
I’m interested in aircraft. I don’t know why it started but it’s pretty much always been there. I grew up near Stansted airport and I can remember seeing the Space Shuttle visit in the early 80s, I saw the 747 and Shuttle circle around from the primary school playing field. When I studied art at secondary school every picture of mine contained an aircraft much to my teacher’s annoyance.
Nowadays it’s easy to see aircraft on the web. I have the planefinder app installed on my phone and often tweet when I spot an A380. I only really tweet the A380 as it’s massive and extremely beautiful.
My aircraft thing also meant I travelled to Stansted to see Air Force One take off a few months ago.
28000
I wanted to find a way to see what military aircraft are doing in the skies and I found a website called 360Radar who have this information. The site isn’t open to public yet and I emailed to see if I could get a test account. They said yes.
I like the site. I like the filters and information that I can see. This site relies on people sharing their MLAT data with them and they will offer a free account if you share data. They have a great comprehensive guide to setting up a system that is currently here. I ordered a small aerial and it arrived today. Within about thirty minutes of getting to the computer I was running the data server and sending information to the network.
I have a USB aerial picking up 1090MHz signals from aircraft. I then have a small program running to collate that data and form it into useful data.
Screen Grab of ADS-B Signals
You can see that I am picking up an aircraft over Cherbourg which I think is quite impressive. All of my aircraft are south of my position because my aerial is placed in a south window. I will look into moving the aerial to a more central, higher position in the house so that I can pick up aircraft all over!
Here’s another screen grab of the output from my aerial.
Another ADS-B Map
How it works
Many aircraft broadcast position information on 1090 MHz. This information comes from the aircraft’s navigation system but does not require the pilot to be involved in the operation of the system. The position of the aircraft is determined by GPS. This output information is called Automatic Dependent Surveillance Broadcast. My little aerial picks this up and reads it. My computer then sends this information to a website which aggregates the information.
For aircraft that don’t output the ADS-B signal their position and direction can be known using multilateration [MLAT]. This involves two or more base stations and measuring the time difference between each station receiving a signal. It’s very clever!
I don’t follow many people on Twitter. It’s a conscious decision that means I actually have the time to read tweets by my friends (see here). I have, however, recently added a couple of new people/things to follow.
@Scienceporn
@CombinedHistory
@MilitaryPorn
I find these generally fascinating and I feel that they actually add something to my life. I’m a complete science whore and so @Scienceporn is awesome. I am unsure about some of the sources and tweets, but the replies to @scienceporn normally ask for references and so it’s a self-sorting system, much like science.
@Combinedhistory is a really clever concept of matching famous pictures with modern backdrops and fusing the two together to give a brilliant time-displacement view of scenes.
@MilitaryPorn is awesome. I’ve always been a fan of military aircraft and in my teenage years I went to lots of airshows. Most of the aircraft that I find gorgeous aren’t really flying anymore and so this tweeter gives me a chance to drool over pictures of planes I’ve always enjoyed. Here’s a selection:
Finally got some prints from my DC trip at Easter. Had my panoramas printed, only the lovely things obviously.
Here’re the X-15 and SR-71 in the dining room:
Here’s the orbiter Discovery next to my Cylon guardian:
And finally the Capitol sitting on the other side of my Cylon:
