How are the 30 day site rankings calculated?
On 22nd August my site was ranked 40,009 and over the weeks it has moved up the rankings really well to the point where on 19th September it was 6057. Since the 19th it has slowed right down (and some days my ranking gets worse) even though my reported positions are up in the same area that they were when my ranking was improving drastically.
Any ideas please?
The 30 days ranking is based on your number of aircraft received and the number of positions over the past 30 days.
ADS-B and MLAT figures add to the total, since last year the catagory “Other” is no longer part of that count since that’s where the not decoded or partial decoded messages reside. This was used by some people that wanted to be high on the ranking, injecting garbage to spice up their numbers.
Here the post from FA about that:
We are making an update to our ADS-B Statistics Leaderboards and how we calculate the rankings for different “Top” categories. Currently, your rank is determined by the number of unique aircraft your receiver tracked and contributed to FlightAware. This includes ADS-B, MLAT, UAT, and “Other” aircraft.
We will be officially removing “Other” aircraft as a factor in the rankings. Other aircraft statistics will continue to be displayed, however it will not be a contributing factor to your overall ranking.
A commonly asked question is what we consider “Other” aircraft.
Other aircraft refers to aircraft that you received Mode-S messages from, but were not tracked via ADS-B or multilateration (MLAT). In other words, the received message did not include position information or were not used in a MLAT calculation to derive its location. These aircraft messages were relevant when ADS-B and MLAT were less widely adopted, so we decided to include all aircraft types towards ADS-B Statistics Rankings at the time.
With the widespread adoption of ADS-B and MLAT today, “Other” aircraft have become less useful for aircraft tracking. Messages that contribute to “Other” aircraft often include unreliable, low-quality data. We have also observed that certain ADS-B receiver settings can cause receivers to emit more data that we consider “Other” aircraft which skews the leaderboard results.
For these reasons, we have chosen not to consider them in your overall ranking going forward.
Monday, April 7, 2025
Actually it’s just number of aircraft. Number of positions doesn’t matter.
Ah yes you are right. Also, an aircraft can pass multiple times a day but would still be counted once per 24 hrs. A medevac helicopter can make multiple flights per day but would only be counted once.
I didn’t know that these “Other” type aircraft weren’t counted, since they appear in the statistics. It seems the way to go would be to scatter several receivers across an area so that these aircraft could be tracked using MLAT.
That explains why my stats aren’t as high as I would expect. I live near to a RAF Base where they train helicopter pilots and I get 10-20 flights per day over the house BUT they probably use a small pool of helicopters so quite often its the same one flying over which would only be counted once per 24 hours.