978/UAT traffic not displayed on main Flightaware Live Flight Tracking site

FlightAware ADS-B Flight Tracking
1

Am I missing a setting or something? I’m new at this, but I’ve been providing 1090 and 978 UAT data for about a week now. Periodicially I see 978 UAT traffic on my Skyview978 page, but when I look on the Flightaware site this traffic is not displayed. I’m also feeding FR24 and Planefinder and the 978 traffic isn’t being displayed on those sites either. If I track by a specific 978 traffic tail number on the main Flightaware website, it does show the traffic with it’s track history etc. but I’ve never been able to see any of the 978 UAT traffic being shown on my Skyview978 on the main Flightaware Live Flight Tracking website?

P.S. I think FEDEX has a lot of their Cessna Caravan 208s equipped with 978/UAT out only in my area of the country, so at times there is numerous 978 targets available.

2

The problem is with flights without a flight plan (called position-only flight)
Position-only flights are not displayed on the live tracking website.
(you can’t enable it either, which i don’t really get)

Their feed clients are not able to decode the UAT format that dump978-fa puts out.
So you are not feeding them UAT data.
You could use uat2esnt, but i’m not sure they would like that.

You’d have to run an extra dump1090-fa (for example with combine1090 GitHub - wiedehopf/combine1090: Combine data from multiple ADS-B receivers into one readsb decoder / tar1090 webinterface).
Then you’d have to enable the output port for combine1090.

Then you need to use a script like this: UAT Translation from Dump978-fa - #11 by KC1IUC

It would get quite complicated and as i said they might not even want UAT messages converted to ADS-B messages.
You would have to ask them.

Would be nice if they could update their feed clients to be able to connect to dump978-fa directly.

3

Are you sure? There is this option, though never checked what it actually does?

image
image2048×357 108 KB

4

Pretty sure :wink:

Just find any small plane on your SkyView.
Click on the flight page for FA.

Then open the live map which displays all flights and search if you can find it:
Live Flight Tracker - FlightAware

For example you won’t find this position-only flight on the live map:
GAF401 German Air Force Flight Tracking and History 14-Jul-2019 - FlightAware

5

Well that is restricted from public view, and too far away from my feeder :wink:

Well there is GA airport nearby, I’ll try when they fly again, although I guess you will be right, I haven’t used the live map at all, just read about the option being there…

6

That’s strange, it was just showing “en route” for me.
Now it doesn’t.

7

image
image1536×702 193 KB

Same info showed up on the flight page of a police helicopter, and that was shown on Skyview but not on the live page.

8

Thanks for that explanation. I’ve been searching for that type answer with no success. I guess I don’t understand what the goal/purpose of these sites is? I understand that 978 UAT is used only in the the US, but traffic is traffic so I don’t understand why that segment of aircraft operations is being ignored on these live flight tracking sites? As a general aviation pilot I rarely file flight plans, and I’d bet there is a large percentage of other GA pilots that don’t either. I don’t file mainly because of the hassle of opening/closing the flight plans at the smaller remote airstrips I like flying too. Also, a lot of flights are just around the local area making a flight plan somewhat useless.

9

The other sites have a much slower pace of software development.

Why the live view on flightaware doesn’t have a switch to switch on all flights that aren’t on a block list, i really don’t know.

10

It’s a performance issue that’s a little thorny to fix currently.

2 Likes
12

Years later thank you for posting this question as I just installed a 978 receiver and had the same question.

1 Like
13

Today FlightRadar24 have released a new 2-in-1 feeder which can feed them both dump1090 and dump978 data.

 

 

14

you’re the expert at converting these builds to ubuntu, getting them to work with dump###-fa, etc. Is this dual 978/1090 available for ubuntu yet?

15

Not sure. Did not try fr24feed dual (1090+978) on Ubuntu amd64 (PC) or on Ubuntu arm64 (RPi)

1 Like
16

I went to the flightradar 24 website and I couldn’t find anything other than the ver 44 debs anyway, so they haven’t made their way to the installation download page yet. they have updated the arm32 and arm64 versions, but not the other versions yet.

I also tried directly changing 44 to 46 on the wget command for the amd64 version and it couldn’t find anything, so they’re not there yet…

I’ll poke around over the next week or so to see if/when they update.

BTW, even in the US, UAT is only a very tiny percentage of my flights. Sometimes I’ll have 300 positions reports, but 0 airplanes because it seems that most UAT flights never file flight plans. Yesterday I had the most ever – about 800 positions. I’m guessing when we get to better weather/clearer skies I’ll have more, but it’ll still be a tiny fraction of the 1090 traffic. So I’m not sure you’re missing much being in GTA.