Im running both FR24 and FA with same Pi and of course the same antenna. This is only my second day with FR24 and have noticed that while the positions reported were very close the Planes reported are quite different.
Todays total were,
FR24 planes - 1288
Flightaware planes - 741
It doesnt bug me I would just would like to know what makes the numbers differ?
Hi Frazpo,
Please see the thread post163791.html. FA is working to improve the message rate and aircraft count.
I think Frazpo is talking about PiAware rather than a FlightFeeder.
The stats should be almost identical if they’re counting distinct aircraft across a day, especially if it’s the same 24 hour period. Did they even out after a day or so? I’m wondering if it’s a GMT vs local time zone issue.
I believe they both are UTC. My day starts at 7pm here. I have noticed a big difference already today. FR24 seems to consistently show more positions and far more aircraft. I know there are quite a few feeders that feed both with the Pi. Maybe a few will pipe in today with some feedback on their setup.
I think it’s because the FlightRadar24 shows all flights passing through you, and already FlightAware displays only flights that have a flight plan.
Sorry my bad! Clearly the lack of sleep is catching up…
I run Piaware and FR24feed (also pfclient) on the same Pi. I had never compared the results until I read this thread. It’s very surprising to see how many more aircraft are shown in my FR24 results compared to Piaware - roughly 25% more.
4/28 4/29 4/30 5/1 5/2 5/3
FA 2,050 2,141 2,233 2,084 1,728 1,806
FR24 2,700 2,799 2,879 2,798 2,380 2,527
Interestingly, FR24 shows a couple to several thousand positions** less **per day than FlightAware, while reporting significantly more aircraft.
For me, it seems to be the other way round: FA reports more planes than FR24:
1/5 2/5 3/5
FA 771 729 657
FR24 597 564 546
PF 596 565 544
Interestingly, FR24 and PF are nearly identical. PF and FR24 feeder client are taking data from dump1090-mutability on port 30005. According to latest log, piaware is connecting to port 10001. So in my case it looks like dump1090-mutability delivers different results on different ports.
the source of the data should be included when comparing. 8)
I would say that data from the websites of FR24 and FA show what’s received by the server (after filtering??).
If not all data is send to the server you will get a discrepancy. After the Germanwings crash I learned that FR24 stores data on their boxes that is not transmitted but can be retrieved.
So it is possible that not all received positions are send to save bandwidth.
Another possibility is that the ‘decoding’ software has certain thresholds before allowing data to be transmitted. Perhaps those of FA are stricter.
This was exactly what I was going to check into. I wondered about the difference in data from different ports and filtering.
Thanks for the replies. I guess realistically then I am actually seeing the higher number of aircraft reported by FR24. Good to know.
Check out this post for a bit more insight into how the number of flights are counted
Not too sure though, Positionless MODE-S flights is useless for FR24 (since non FR24 equip/feeds isn’t used for MLAT). My status are the opposite, FA is higher and FR24 lower. I’m using the same Dump1090 feed.
5/1 5/2 5/3 5/4 5/5* 5/6
FA 430 332 462 466 439 458
FR24 217 195 228 252 236 240
Interesting. I am unsure how FR24 picks and chooses data. FA seems to make sense with proximity and which feed it picks data from however FR24 is strange. I will see feed 80 miles to my west on a flight that is 80 miles to my east. I think I have noticed one time my feed was used to track a flight on the web page. Just an observation. Kind of off topic but have wondered why.