Gina wrote:Although there was a small blip on the temperature plot about an hour and a half ago, there was nothing showing on the recording anywhere near that time. Maybe I'll have more success with ferrite rod aerials - hopefully!
I suspect that if nothing is showing with a long wire antenna, you don't have enough signal amplification. The FO PWS can find the pulse even with an earthed screen on its 'antenna'.
How do you fancy making a receiver to decode pulse width modulated data from passing aircraft Gina? It's not that hard and you could contribute your data to a site like this one.
http://www.flightradar24.com/ (click on any aircraft icon to see its data in a small window)
The data contains exact positional information, altitude, speed, heading, place of origin and destination, as well as the plane's callsign.
A half decent setup can collect data from aircraft passing at high altitude within 120 miles.
I started watching this site when the volcanic ashes had most stuff grounded, and then realised that the data is supplied by amateurs. While most of them buy a gizmo for £480 and software to decode and upload to the web, others cut up old satellite tuners, adapt local oscillators in them to make the front end deal with the 1090MHZ 1mbit/second data bursts and cobble a cheapo microprocessor onto it to decode the data.
Take a look here. Some of these have been made for a tenner ->
http://www.lll.lu/~edward/edward/adsb/V ... eiver.html
This is what I meant earlier when I said I might have another project for you once you have sorted the interference problem.