ADS-B Network News: Antenna Placement

Location, Location, Location...

Spring is here and while everyone else is dusting off shelves and tackling the garage… ADS-B folks know the real spring cleaning involves looking at our ADS-B receiver setups and thinking, “I wonder if I can get a little more range out of this.”

🛫 Antenna placement options

Let’s start at the top. Nothing beats mounting a good outdoor antenna high up outside. We featured a couple setups installed on top of towers in our last newsletter and considering ADS-B is line-of-site, you can’t get better than a clear 360° view above all surrounding trees and buildings. If getting an antenna up on a roof, mast, or pole is an option for you, you’re one of the lucky ones! It’s almost always worth the effort (as long as you’re doing it safely).

But you don’t always need an outdoor install to see solid results. The reality is the majority of people can only do an indoor install, and that’s ok! But different parts of your home will play a role on the reception you get which is why placement matters so much.

An outdoor antenna installed inside is the next best install. Putting it up in your attic (as long as your roof isn’t metal, doesn’t have a foil-backed radiant barrier, and isn’t concrete) is a great move if it’s an option for you. Another great spot is mounting the antenna in a window (although some modern Low-E glass can have a metallic coating that reflects heat and radio signals).

The first thing I did after closing on my house was to get my antenna installed in a window that faces my closest airport. Running ethernet came next.

Finally, fully indoor setups for those who don’t have access to an attic or window are still a great option. A compact indoor antenna placed high up on a bookshelf or similar and close to an external wall is your best bet. If your exterior walls are made of brick, concrete, or stucco, you’ll really want to try and get it as close to a window as you can. If your area has heavier air traffic from one direction (likely because of a nearby airport), try and put the antenna on that side of your house.

🏡 Finding the best spot

The key to all setups, but especially fully indoor ones, is experimenting. Try different rooms, different walls, and different windows. Moving your antenna a few feet can change your reception more than you’d expect.

It doesn’t have to be a guessing game though. One of the best tools that you already have is built into your ADS-B stats page. To get there, simply log in to your flightaware.com account and then at the top select ADS-B > Statistics (or My ADS-B > Stats, depending on your view) to get to your page.

More messages coming from SSE direction

This graph can indicate a couple different things: the antenna has a clearer view towards the South (or restricted view of the North; depends if you’re a glass half empty or half full kind of person), or there may simply be more traffic from the South. Either way, this can help you dial in your antenna location. Note that you can click on “Last 24 Hours” just above the chart to pick different days from a calendar. That makes it easy to compare different days if you’ve been trying out different antenna locations. It’s important that you leave your antenna in one place long enough to gather good data, and you should also compare across similar days and times to get normalized results.

But maybe you want something that makes it easier to see live reception info, or an easy way to compare what coverage looked like between different locations or various antennas. We have been hard at work on a new tool to do just that!

📊 Coming soon!

While not available for download quite yet, new functionality is on the way that will allow users to capture and store reception data, generate plots from historical data, and more.

Make sure to subscribe to our newsletter to hear about the upcoming release.