AirNav RadarBox FlightStick - ADS-B USB Receiver with Integrated Filter, Amplifier and ESD Protection

This dongle greatly increased my range over the regular rtl-sdr. Highly recommended.

Compared to a Flightaware pro blue stick with LNA and filter this cheaper alternative works the same. I get the same amount of aircraft with both, which is a drastic improvement over using a non purpose built RTL receiver.

quality meets expectations

Im pretty shocked. I get about the same performance as the FlightAware sticks and this thing is half the price. My range went from about 90 NM to 130 NM. A nice boost! If youre setting up an ADSB receiver or want to pep yours up I think this is a worthy purchase. I updated my review to add a picture of graphs from the last three months to show how much better the stick is compared to an SDR dongle.

This receiver significantly improved performance over the generic RTL-SDR.

Dont expect any instructions on how to use this thing. The AirNav platform is no good, and costly. The free data uploader account is not free. I use with the Avare app.

I have been using the FlightAware Pro Stick on my two RPi ADS-B feeders for nearly two years with excellent results, but when I saw this for $10, I had to give it a try. First of all, it was a simple swap-out, nothing more needed on my existing setup. I was pleasantly surprised to see that the performance was as good as or even a bit better with the number of positions tracked. Ill be watching the data closely for the next few days, but the initial results were very promising, so much so that I ordered another for my second feeder. For $10 you cant go wrong!

It does work. It’s better than the cheap Chinese ones with no amp. This is no where near the performance of the flightaware pro plus for the same money

I have been a radarbox customer before- I am on my 2nd Commstation- something happened to the first one and wouldnt work anymore, and since last year, I am having issues with the second, and I have gotten no where with support. I figured I would get this, to see how it worked. I first tried it on an old computer, and on the radarbox site it would show that it was working, but it wasnt picking anything up. The software would not pick up anything at all, and even wouldnt show that it was connected. On a brand new computer, the same issue has happened. Support has been nonexistent, both on the commstation and also on this flightstick.

I bought this stick to replace a RTL-SDR dongle. I thought that the built-in filter would yield better performance, but this was not the case. Using it with a Pi Zero W running PiAware, there was a huge decrease in the number of flights seen (from around 1800 per day to only 200 or so). Maybe I got a bad unit or something, since it also runs hot. The RTL-SDR also gets hot, but at least it has a metal case to act as a heatsink. You can see in the attached picture when I was using the AirNav FlightStick versus the RTL-SDR dongle, and its like night and day.