Maybe it wasn't the antenna connector after all.

 So I've been using Balena ADS-B for quite some time now and I've had some misgivings about the "cloud-managed" part of it.  Don't get me wrong, it's good!  But I wasn't fully happy with it, and the reasons weren't going to change anytime soon.

In the meantime, a friend in town had spun up a receiver using ADSB.im and was loudly proclaiming its benefits.  I'm slow to switch platforms, though, so I waited for a while to see how it worked for him.

Then one day I was in my kitchen and I heard a weird vibration sound coming from the attic.  I knew that the fan on the POE+ HAT had been going bad, and a quick trip into the attic revealed just how bad it had been going. It still spun, but it was in its death throes.  I had another, different POE HAT coming in the mail shortly thereafter.

So a few Saturdays ago I pulled the Pi from the attic onto the bench and swapped out POE hats (My new one is from GeeekPi and it's much better designed. More on that in another post), and while I was doing that I threw in a new SD card with ADSB.im on it and took it all back to the attic and plugged everything back in (along with a TEMPer thermal sensor) and went back to the main computer to configure it.

 I was a little peeved that Balena doesn't offer a quick and easy way to export all your data from a machine in your "fleet", but a select-copy-paste to a text file from the web page got the important variables.  Setup was a breeze?  ADSB.im recognized that I had two different USB receivers (1090MHz ADS-B and 978MHz UAT) and read the serial numbers off of each of them to figure out which was which.  Granted, when I set the serial numbers I set them to the frequency they received so it was sort of easy to figure out but it's a nice bit of automation to throw in there.

Now with the graphs I can see my shitty UAT antenna actually receives data.  But also the new POE HAT allows the processor to run 10°C cooler (partly because the fan works).  I'm also feeding to a bunch more services  I ended up having to put the USB ambient temp sensor on a pigtail because the all-metal case was conducting heat from the RaspberryPi and throwing off the readings, but other than that it's been a tweak-free setup and it's been nice seeing my FlightAware rankings rise again. I can also control when the updates happen, so no more mid-day reboots.

Overall a lot of improvements!