Aircrafts count ?

Hi,

I wonder how you count the aircrafts seen : When I have begun to feed data in september 2013, I was using a dongle and a small antenna on my roof, never seing more than 100 A/C simultaneously.
Now that I have a 1090Puck and a dedicated antenna on a pylone, I see around 150 A/C all day long and my A/C count in FlightAware is lower that in the “dongle period”.

So I wonder how you count the aircrafts seen per day : different ones or lost and recovered ones ? Number of “segments” ?

I mean that some stations with a very limited sight have an impressive A/C count and I find this quite strange.

Best regards
J-Luc F1JEK

http://i.imgur.com/YibGkFf.png

Hi Jean-Luc
You did not say when it was that you changed to the Puck but you will see from your stats that the number of reports per flight increased from approximately 75 to 115 from Sat 15 February.

flightaware.com/user/f1jek/adsb#153

Regards
Richard
GW4XXJ

Hi Richard,

I have seen that but it has no relation : the Puck has been started on 11 dec 2013. It can handle much more planes than a dongle (50% at least) but is not obvious in the FA stats. But it is on PP and base station !

73’s de J-Luc F1JEK

That is strange. My dongle only sees half the number of flights to my SBS-1.

Since you also changed antennas when you got the puck I would go back to using the dongle but with the new antenna and see if things improve over the puck. If they do then there must be something wrong with your puck.

I was not clear I think in my explanations and I missed something (english is not my native language) : FA sees the same count of A/C since I have upgraded my installation but on Plane Plotter it’s obvious that the Puck is far better than the dongle. Base station shows 170 aircrafts during the day when RTL1090 was stuck at 100.

In other words, FA does not reflect at all the enhancement of my radio station.

This is why I think that FA has a strange way of counting the planes seen.

:slight_smile:

I would agree with that, Flightaware seems to have an inconsistent way of determining flight totals and other statistics. I understand that at zero UTC one day is added and one is deleted so it’s an average of the last 30 days.
However, I was not feeding from march 14th to march 24th and my total seen a has decreased. So apparently they count that 10 days I wasn’t feeding as a zero and include those in the average. The other thing I don’t understand is how mytotal days feeding is stuck at 19. It was 30 on march 14th dropped 19 by the 24th and has remained there to this day. Very puzzling.

Dan