Greetings from Auckland, New Zealand

[NZ-Kiwi]

Hi everyone

A couple of weeks ago I was spending time watching YouTube (my other half calls it procrastinating or similar) and I saw a few videos showing just what you can do with an RTL1090 SDR from listening to radio broadcasts, tracking aircraft to downloading weather satellite info and a lot more. So I had to give it a go.

Looking on the RTL-SDR website I saw that there was a local agent in NZ who listed the hardware on TradeMe (our kiwi version of Ebay), so I ordered one on the Sunday and it arrived by 2.30pm the next day (awesome service projectilefish).

Day one and I was listening to FM radio using rtl1090 and SDRSharp, thinking this is working pretty well. Over the next couple of weekends I got dump1090 working, then Flight Radar 24 and finally Virtual Radar.

It is simply awesome what you can do with such low cost gear.

Now I can see this will be a great hobby to spend time on and I'll be seeing how much of my university learning I can apply (degrees around physics / electronics / instrumentation).

Time to study up what type on antennae will work best and time to get building some.

Thanks to all the contributors to all the flags and silhouettes as they are a good addition to Virtual Radar.

[Anmer]

Welcome to the hobby and forum.

[Roadrunner]

Welcome to the hobby

[NZ-Kiwi]

Thank you for the welcomes.

Am enjoying tracking aircraft around the top of the North Island of New Zealand, plus I've also built a QFH antenna for downloading weather images from the NOAA 15/18/19 satellites.

I've got a Raspberry Pi ordered so I can automate the weather satellite downloads plus am tempted to get another SDR to also do the ADSB downloads 24x7.

[NZ-Kiwi]

This sure is an addictive and fun hobby.

I've now got a Raspberry Pi which runs:

• RTL-SDR connected to a home made QFH which is automatically downloading and decoding NOAA satellite data (working on Meteor M2 too)
• RTL-SDR connected to a home made discone antenna using dump1090 and VRS (using mono to run it on the Raspberry Pi)

The one problem I have is that some trees in the garden are impacting the signal and the other half won't let me get them cut down to improve it.

Has anyone moved house so they are on a hill top with no obstructions yet?

[Anmer]

Has anyone moved house so they are on a hill top with no obstructions yet?

I had three very large Cedar trees to the south which didn't cause too much of a signal barrier.  The terrain was pretty flat all around.

Then I moved to a location, 500 feet ASL, looking south across the sea. I have rising ground to the west which reduces range in that direction.

Nearest I'm going to get to being "on a hill top with no obstructions".