February Featured station

The Featured Station is our space on the blog to tell the story of our collaborators around the world. We currently have more than 15,000 stations around the world, and there are many stories to be told. Monthly, we will bring the story of our ADS-B stations around the world here.

Today we are going to tell the story of one of our collaborators, Marco Dutra, our collaborator since 2010, located on the top of Faial Island, in the Azores, Portugal.

Our collaborator Marco Dutra and his amateur radio equipment and ADS-B.

The PGANRB500358 station is located at the top of the island of Faial, 1043 meters above sea level, and the antenna is installed 12 meters above the ground with a 360º view. The average range of the station is 307 nautical miles. Or in kilometers, 568 kilometers. An incredible range!

Photos of the installation site:

Faial Island 

The island of Faial is located at the western end of the Central Group of the Azores archipelago, separated from the island of Pico by a narrow stretch of sea measuring 8.3 km (or 4.5 nautical miles) in width, known as the Faial. The island has the approximate shape of an irregular pentagon, 21 km long in an east-west direction and a maximum width of 14 km, corresponding to an area of 172.43 km². The resident population is 15 063 inhabitants (2001), most of whom are in Horta, the city where the Azorean parliament is located and the seat of the island's only municipality.

Faial Island location on the map

In his 11 years of experience with RadarBox and ADS-B, Marco gives some tips to collaborators regarding the installation of the equipment. "It is very important that the antenna is high and free of obstacles, low loss coaxial cable (I use Heliax) and a 1090MHz bandpass filter. My system has a cascade of filters because the station is close to many other transmitters and so I had to filter out the interfering signals. "

Marco had his first contact with RadarBox through his brother, who also has a RadarBox ADS-B station located in São Miguel Island, the largest of the islands in the Azores archipelago, in Portugal.

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