Popped over to Electrowerkz last night to see 3Teeth play. There were support bands but I didn’t watch them due to spending time in the bar chatting to people. The support were:
Stereo Juggernaut
Deadfilmstar
Ventenner
3Teeth were on from 22:00 hours and I was quite impressed. They played a solid set. The first three songs were probably the best and I am sure that once they have created more music the rest will be as strong.
3 Teeth
Oddly I got admonished by a man for talking too loudly in the main performance room! Very strange, the sound of the band was perfectly loud enough!
There’s a couple of gigs coming up soon so look to see what I think of them.
Took a trip out to the riverside down at Rochester last night. A good way to avoid the heat is to go to the cinema. Two hours in a nice air-conditioned room being entertained. I went to see Bad Moms and rated it afterwards on IMDB, please see this communication regarding my rating system.
Right, this wasn’t a critically acclaimed film. But I laughed at points and I didn’t hate it. It has Mila Kunis in it! I haven’t seen any of the other “Bad” series, I don’t even know or care if they are made by the same people, but this one cheered me for a short while.
A short while ago my proper aerial turned up for the ADS-B system I have running in the loft. See this communication and this one also. This new aerial means I should have a better receiver based in the loft. It is currently picking up 47 aircraft flying within range and the Virtual Radar Server gives the following as a webpage output:
There is a sidebar which connects to the web and gives me information about the selected aircraft and the others flying within range. This does not show all aircraft, only those with an ADS-B transponder. I also supply my data to a MLAT service for 360Radar.
The above photo shows the system in the loft. The white stick is a surround for the aerial. This connects to a dongle which connects to a Raspberry Pi3 and this, in turn, connects wirelessly to my home network.
I know you really want to know about the splat so here they are. Firstly one from before the new aerial.
Constriction
Here’s the latest, all altitudes are in one colour.
The range is a bit better with two very odd pips into central France. The following is a colour one for you mammals out there.
The next thing is to try installing a purpose made ADS-B USB stick. After that I think I will stop. It appears to be one of those “who can get the best splat” things online and I’m not interested in taking part.
I have been to the Lake District a few times and every time it stuns me as I drive from Penrith to Keswick. I went to see a friend of mine and he said he had a good activity for us on the Friday!
Our task was to walk around the Keswick end of Derwent Water and find the locations where three of the four clips were filmed. They cheated a bit in the film because one of the backdrops was filmed from the Lodore Falls end of the lake and then made up to be from the north end of the lake [naughty!], this is the location we didn’t try to find.
The first scene backdrop we looked for was filmed near the transmission tower to the edge of Keswick. It’s labelled in the clip as “Flying Southwest from Castlerigg over Great Wood”, TS00:21. The screenclip below shows the approximate position of the filming location as it was taken from a helicopter.
The second filming position occurs at TS00:41 and is labelled “Looking Northeast Near Brandelhow Point”. This one was filmed from a static camera and so was easier to pin point from where it was filmed.
The last filming location we looked for was the attack on the pub-by-the-lake. Its labelled in the clip as “Looking Northwest from the Shorline West of Crow Park”, TS01:13. We found this spot on the shores of Derwent Water.
Fortunately for us, Marc had a good knowledge of the area and also an iPad with the Star Wars film and the YouTube clip. Also, his dad is a Lake District expert, being on his third time around all the Wainwrights.
The next morning I had a run and much like two years ago my aim was to run up a mountain. Clearly I chose one of the smaller ones and I toodled up Latrigg.
I did enjoy it although I headed around the town afterwards as an extra as although the climb was hard work I had rested plenty by the time I was down. Here’s a panorama I took once at the summit of Latrigg.
Shortly after the run I drove back home. My plan was to cross the Pennines, turn at Scotch Corner and follow the A1(M), but I missed that last turning and so did most of the M1, Oh well!
I will soon be heading off to Europe for a weekend of music. I’ll be heading to Hanover for a German goth music festival.
Hanover
It’s quite a long journey, but one I am looking forward to very much. I always find the journey to be a lot of fun. Obviously not as much fun as actually getting to your destination but still a major part of the whole experience.
I have noticed that I have decreased range in two directions on the ADS-B receiver.
There’s a waist!
Because the colours represent the ranges at different altitudes I’ve got a version with just one colour.
Constriction
This one shows a clear restriction in range in the NW and SE direction as marked by the red line. I do not know what is causing this but I have an observation to make. I live in a row of terraced houses and the direction of the road matches the constriction direction. While the aerial is in the loft there is extra “stuff” in the way in these directions because of the houses next to me.
Terrace
I’m pretty sure this matches up. There is definitely a correlation. Whether that means there’s causation I don’t know but it seems reasonable. I might write a communication about altitudes and the natural obstructions around me [I’m looking forward to the maths involved].
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.
Spotted! 9M-MNF (MH3) using @planefinderhttps://t.co/eOkZ5aOMBepic.twitter.com/3IQx0fcfaE
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!
