ADSB Exchange and Virtual Radar Server
Happy Friday, everybody!
It's a pleasure to announce some pretty good news: We now have support for ADSB Exchange! And even better: It has been implemented by the community. Thanks to Gareth Howell for creating the pull request, and to Marcel Stör for writing the original code.
Upgrading your installation is easy. If you used the Deploy with balena-button when you first installed, you'll simply use the button again to refresh your application. All your settings will be retained. Then, do the manual steps required to configure ADSB Exchange.
If you have used the more advanced git-based setup, simply pull the source repo and push it back to your balena application. Then step through the manual actions required to configure ADSB Exchange.
Virtual Radar Server
Earlier this week, DanBuBerlin asked if it would be possible to open the ports necessary to let balena ADS-B feed Virtual Radar Server. Luckily, that's a feature that only required a minimal change, and as a consequence we added it straight away. So if you happen to have Virtual Radar Server running somewhere, now you can combine it with balena ADS-B. Happy days.
FlightAware MLAT Issues?
MLAT can sometimes be challenging. Last week, we did some joint debugging together with Placemaster. He reported issues with FlightAware's MLAT feeding stopping on a Raspberry Pi 3. The symptoms: A red warning on the FlightAware dashboard, and complaints about "clock unstable." As you can read about in the issue, there can be several reasons for this problem. But in this case, a new 3 amp power supply fixed the fault. Good to know if you see the same red flag over at FlightAware.
That's all for this time, folks! Happy feeding!
Ketil