My station in Toronto (Etobicoke), ON, Canada

[Taxom]

Hi all!
This is my station AIS, ADS-B:

Hardware
Inside BOX:

1. OrangePi Zero2
2. for ADS-B RTL-SDR dongle + LNA(21dB) with SAW (1090)
3. for AIS RTL-SDR dongle + SAW (TB0436A)
4. 10W USB Power adapter
5. 5v 4010 fan

RTL-SDR (R860) dongle inside (two identical):

ADS-B > LNA with SAW 1090 (SAW datasheet: https://www.taisaw.com/assets/PDF/TA1090EC%20_Rev.3.0_.pdf):

AIS > SAW 162MHz (SAW TB0436A datasheet: https://www.taisaw.com/assets/PDF/TB0436A%20_Rev.1.0_.pdf):

The AIS flower pot antenna:


calculator: https://vk2zoi.com/articles/half-wave-flower-pot/

Simple cheap antenna from Ali for ADS-B

It is installed on the balcony of a condo (approximately 50m above ground). Therefore, it has a limited overview of the horizon.

Software
OS Debian, AIS-catcher, dump1090-fa and the feeders for many ADS-B aggregators.

my AIS feeders:
https://www.shipxplorer.com/stations/SXAISD0000204
https://www.myshiptracking.com/stations/station?id=736
https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/details/stations/23355/_:9e7a5cc315c8f17f39f6afb8278e1656

my ADS-B feeders:
https://www.flightradar24.com/account/feed-stats/?id=18216
https://www.radarbox.com/stations/EXTRPI014534
https://www.flightaware.com/adsb/stats/user/Taxom#stats-159675

I will be happy to answer your questions. 73!

[jvde-github]

Nice! Thanks for sharing.

[OE1MWW]

Hi Taxom,
do you have any source to buy the SAW TB0436A ?

73s

[Taxom]

Hi,
I bought it in Digikey, but now, unfortunately, this is no longer there.
https://www.digikey.ca/en/products/detail/tst/TB0436A/16906921

[mdkendall]

Nice. It is interesting that you saw such an improvement with the addition of the 162MHz SAW, since it has 2.7dB loss. I guess there must be an out-of-band strong local interferer that overloads the RTL-SDR front end? Or maybe the RTL-SDR does not have good spurious response rejection?

[Taxom]

No, this is not so, after I installed the filter, I compensated this increase the gain. The SDR has very poor adjacent-channel selectivity, this is a common problem of such type receivers.

And I have some powerful weather transmitting near AIS-channels.

There are more about this in these two topics:
https://discussions.flightaware.com/t/howto-run-ads-b-receiver-ais-receiver-on-same-rpi/85040/121
https://discussions.flightaware.com/t/does-anyone-monitor-ais-ship-and-vessel-tracking/53634/408

[mdkendall]

Thanks. Those links are interesting. I will do some testing with a broadcast FM reject filter (I have one on hand) and I will see if I can find a source for a 162MHz SAW, or build an LC filter to experiment with.