Nooelec 1090ES & UAT - Radios and High Gain Antennas. Dual-Band NESDR Nano 2 ADS-B (978MHz & 1090MHz) Bundle, Starter Edition, for Stratux™, Avare, Foreflight & FlightAware

This is an excellent product if you’re looking to build a Stratux ADS-B receiver. The radios and antennas shipped quickly and arrived in a box packaged very well. Installation Into the raspberry pi is a breeze because both radios are USB. One note to consider when purchasing this product is that you have to take the black plastic case after each radio to fit side-by-side in the USB ports. The cases pop off without needing any special tools or excessive effort. Each radio was labeled with a preprogrammed 1090 or UAT frequency and the corresponding frequency labeled on the included antenna. I have been using an older generation set a radios for my stratux and since upgrading to these radios have not seen any loss of signal quality for traffic reported as I fly.

Works great for building a small mobile receiver like the Stratux. The included and antennas work great but I did find the dongles do not work with RadarBox antennas. I'm unsure as to why, possibly the jumper to sma didn't mesh with the long range RadarBox antennas, for that use the RadarBox dongles to build a permanent flight feeder.

Using a RasberryPi 3B the SDRs will need to have their cases removed, otherwise they will not fit vertically or horizontally next to each other in the Pi USB ports. Removing them will allow them to dissipate heat a bit better anyway and your Pi is already a raw PCB as is. The cases are very easy to separate and take very little force to pry them apart - I used my fingernail. Once the cases are removed they fit perfectly stacked on top of each other or side by side. I stacked them which made the wires the most organized. The pictures show the bets way I found to deal with the wires. It would have been nice if one of the cables was perhaps 1cm longer to relieve some of the strain caused by such a sharp bend, but it does fit with this configuration with an acceptable amount of strain on the USB connections.The kit comes with frequency stickers, I suggest putting one on each SDR and the other on the exterior case so you know which antenna goes where. The antennas are already labeled.Update: I reduced my rating from a 5 to a 3. The SDR's work great, fit in my case, worked immediately, etc. But I was getting what I felt was poor performance. I bought the smaller antenna's instead and things then worked great. I've been using it for about a year now. I am also a HAM and finally got an antenna analyzer and on a whim decided to see how the antennas perform. For those that don't know, an SWR basically tells you what an antenna is tuned to. 1.0 is perfectly tuned to the frequency you want... 2... 3... you'll get receiption.. 4 or 5 it'll start being pretty limited pretty quickly - mounting location, distance to interference, etc will all affect it though. I connected the small and large in basically the same place in my house, moved around a bit to find the best relative signal - and measured all of them. The small antennas you can buy are acceptable - being under 3 and under 2 typically - completely acceptable being in less than an ideal location. The large antennas - that are utterly useless - both of them showing upwards of 30-50 and occasionally showing as a completely open circuit (ie as if they don't even exist). If one was doing it I'd write it off as a fluke, but both the 978Mhz and 1050Mhz antennas were acting the same way. Personally, I'll still with the smaller antenna based on these results and I'll be trashing the set that came with this.My advice is to order the other kit - with the smaller antennas that list as not as good. Had it not been a year since I ordered this I'd send them back, but I didn't have the tooling to test them back when I bought them.

I used the two SDRs for a Stratux build. In order to mount the two units side by side you will need to remove the plastic covers. Easy enough to pry apart with a sharp blade. Don't forget to label each unit as 1090 or 978. Wrapped each unit in single layer of Kapton (polyamide) tape for electrical isolation and heat dissipation. These units must draw the maximum current allowed for a USB 2.0 port and then some. Would have rated 5 stars if the units didn't get so darned hot. Luckily the case I am using has a small fan for the USB accessories that keeps the end connectors at least touchable. The cable assys are sized right to fit the case and attach to the antennas. Most of all I get good sensitivity 5 nm from MCC. Have not been able to test in the air.

For my build it yourself Stratux unit, I got the kit with just the high gain antennas, since I didn't see a need for the medium gain antennas that are also included in a different kit. The pictures show how the SDRs (software definable radios) attach to the Raspberry Pi 3 motherboard (one is partially hidden by the connector forthe external GPS USB plug. I popped the cases off to give them more room to breath, as they can get pretty hot. UI went with external GPS as its accuracy is 0 meters, as opposed to the internal GPS option which has accuracy of 29 meters, and adds additional heat to the inside of the case. The completed assemble shows the antennas mounted. You can also mount them on the Summit Link case on the sides, and that will reduce the total vertical height, but soes make it wider and a bit harder to transport in your flight bag. Of course you can dismount the antennas before and after using the unit, but I figured that would be unnecessary wear and tear on the connector. Very easy to install as part of the Stratux kit, and this kit with just the high gain antennas costs $3 less than the one with both high gain and medium gain antennas.

I purchased a few of these kits to use on FlightAware PiAware kits (Raspberry Pi 3B+).The flight aware receivers (Orange & Blue) models are too large to fit both receivers in a Raspberry Pi.This looked like a nice solution to integrate two receivers into a single PiAware unit without having to use USB extension cables or a powered hub.Having recently added UAT-978 receivers to multiple PiAware units, I thought I'd give this receiver kit a try.On the 1080 ADS-B side, the Nano receiver is only receiving 40-50% of the signals that the control PiAware with FlightAware SDRs are receiving. Thinking it may be an antenna issue, I've swapped antennas with the control unit, however the FligtAware SDRs still out performed the NooElec Nano SDR.I'll keep experimenting, but do not expect to see the same results as the FlightAware receivers.