The planes passing over the house have always interested me. Who are they, where are they flying to?
Although there are numerous small projects where the planes as small image are projected in your room when flying over, this was a bit too much.
So I did something similar, but not to that extend. Using a raspberry pi, a dongle and antenna just on my windowsill and running the fr24feed software created a simple graph capturing the amount of planes seen. Using the app for fr24feed (since you connect your device to their system where all data comes in, you get privileges in the app where normally you would have to pay for. See https://www.flightradar24.com/share-your-data for more details.
So hopping along I started to wonder what the difference would be if my device with antenna would go up, physically. As the house was in the way with the antenna in the windowsill, from street level looking into the sky a great deal was missing. There were days when the counter stuck at 5 while I could spot more planes.
So what was the trick? Would an antenna on higher ground fix that difference?
It did. On the attic, with a height difference of about 8 meters, I placed a second raspberry pi with a dongle, but with a better antenna outside the window, connected onto the window frame. That resulted in a difference of about factor 10-14 as seen in the graph below, of the last 7 days. (green is the lower raspberry, yellow the higher one)
That could even be improved by placing the antenna over the side of the house, however due to building construction and height – a ladder of over 8 meters from the balcony is needed – I am not pursuing this….
Anyhow, it works and looks great. Below an sample of the data ‘seen’ by the flight tracker up in the attic.
