Greetings. I have a question about how that 30-day list that changes hourly works. Three months ago, I finally made it to the 8000’s…8975 to be exact. Then that night I dropped to 9020, and from that point on, have dropped every day, occasionally I go in the correct direction, but mostly down in rank…and now am at 10512. Quite demoralizing if you ask me. I live at 1075 feet by Mount Hood…my antenna is on the top of a 34 ft mast…the antenna sits 7 ft above my 32 foot tall house (2 story)…360 degree view of the sky…it picks up beacons from planes 250+ miles away…Portland Int. Airport isn’t a puddle hopper airport…what is it that flightaware looks at? How does the page come up with this 30-day ranking that changes hourly???
Each airframe is counted once a day at a maximum. (or something along those lines)
It completely depends on your location if you even have the slightest chance to reach top spots.
(Top 500 are pretty much reserved for the US east coast and Europe i think)
Pretty sure that it’s impossible to find a good metric for the ranking.
Also note that the previous poster isn’t happy about the ranking despite being in the Top 100 i believe.
Oh and the 30-day ranking is composed of the last 30 times 24h hours it seems.
So depending on where your live your best rank will be when you have the low traffic days outside of that 30-day window.
(for example thursday and friday might be included twice when it’s currently friday)
In short: Be content that you are not living in Africa or Northern Canada.
You might be the only feeder covering the area but you rank would still be really bad.
Not much more to say, the rating doesn’t say much.
I rarely look to my ranking. Last I saw it was over an year ago.
Keeping away from ranking competition keeps me happy and keeps my blood pressure normal.
On the US West Coast we only get so many planes. Here in the Bay Area we get more traffic from Asia than you do up in Portland I suspect. My near optimal installation maxes out around the 3500 ranking. As someone noted, US East Coast and Europe see many more planes than we do out west. Alas, I wished that position count would be part of the ranking. Whatever the ranking is based on, always someone will be unhappy about it. What can you do.
It’s worth checking the rankings for your own country as well.
Also, when you scroll down your stats page, you can see how your receiver compares with others that are near you which will give a relatively good indication of the maximum you’re likely to receive.
The three feeders I’m responsible for are all very good with superb numbers of aircraft and positions reported - There are a finite number of aircraft within reception range and there becomes a point where if you see all traffic within your maximum range, it’s just not possible to see any more, no matter what you do.
Unless you can bribe ATC to route more through your local airspace
I’m competitive by nature so I do look at the rankings and try to improve the feeders as much as possible which benefits everyone I feed data to.
I think there are two stats pages. Both of them have a problem with allowing multiple locations for a site for totals. I really don’t understand why there are not separate lists for single and multiple location sites.
The first list one you encounter when scrolling down is your rank against the world. This one is next to meaningless to your site ranking except by accident of your location.
The second list (bottom of the page) is the sites within some distance from you. (20 miles?) This list is great because you can compare yourself to other sites in your area which theoretically should be the same (same number of planes in the air) except for environmental issues like antenna height, buildings, trees, other broadcast/RF interference, component quality, gain, over which you have some control.
So this last list can give you some idea if you are in the ballpark so to speak and this is the place where you can compete with your neighbors. I would love to have some mechanism to chat amongst these neighbors.
Don’t know as there are no multiple location sites in my local area. You are correct for the national sites as viewed from “adsb” then “stats”.
Than again, I have never seen one listed on my daily regional stats but if you see two listing for yourself you must be correct.
I do have a question though about multiple locations for same site.
Can each location track/report the same positions?
Can each location report the same aircraft?
Are these aircraft/position credited to each location.
So if I put location a new location one mile down the street I would essentially be tracking the same flights but doubling my numbers? I’m just trying to figure out what the use of this is. Either side of a mountain I understand. One is Chicago and one in Detroit and one in Buffalo I understand. Are there rules?
No deduplication, the numbers are just added as far as i know.
Anything but site rating is rather pointless in my opinion, there have been discussions about this.
This part of the stats page:
Highest User Ranking Achieved in Last 30 Days: 817
was also discussed before and i believe it was changed to the site rating of the highest ranked site that user has.
But the annotation wasn’t changed or something.
Anyway this is all rather pointless.
One could of course make another count with these positions:
FLIGHTS WITH POSITIONS FROM THIS FEEDER ON FLIGHTAWARE.COM WITHIN THE LAST HOUR
That would favor sparsely covered areas.
But i’m sure people with lots of other feeders around would be furious
You could of course make some source of compound rating.
Those “actually used” positions could be factored with 100 or something, number of aircraft seen could be multiplied by 100 as well.
Then you add those two factored counts to the total position count.
The weights/factors would probably need tweaking but it seems totally doable.
I know watching that ranking number drop can be frustrating @CaptJSparrow0468. If it’s any consolation, I’m disappointed in my 30-Day Ranking!
Between PiAwares and FlightFeeders we add a few hundred new sites each week. Many of these are on or near airport as we are expanding our surface tracking capabilities. That will contribute to fluctuations.
It would be great if FA could provide some type of api access so we can compile our own stats - I’ve asked previously but it seems that is not in the plan currently. I keep a google sheet & keep stats I gather directly in a time series db - but I can only compare my own sites
