Ground ADS-B sensors may be better for local traffic. But the oceans are pretty sparsely populated with receivers. Space based receivers would also add a significant difference in z-axis, which should improve MLAT accuracy. I have no idea if that is part of the thought process, but that’s what springs immediately to my mind.
FlightAware’s ground-based ADS-B network will remain an extremely vital part of our flight tracking solutions and we will continue to actively develop and grow both the software and the network. There are lots of things we intend to do solely with the ground-based network, like MLAT, surface movement, etc. FlightAware expects to have over 10,000 ADS-B ground stations online by the end of 2016 and over 17,500 by the end of 2017!
To ensure that we continue to grow the world’s largest terrestrial ADS-B network of free and low-cost access to ADS-B data, we are actually increasing our production of FlightFeeders and our development of PiAware software. On a related note, you can expect a new PiAware-related hardware announcement next month!
Nope…that’s actually one of our two models of FlightFeeders. The one in the video is our “FlightFeeder Orange,” which has an orange plastic case and a touch screen. We started shipping those a few months ago and they’re very popular since they’re easy to setup and debug without having to plug in an HDMI monitor.
In the lower right of the screen, you can see the actual receiver hardware, which is actually a ProStick with the orange case taken off. We ship about 75 FlightFeeders a week to parts of the world with little or no coverage. The video also shows the filters that can be optionally used with the FF Orange.
Then, if I understand correctly, if we build systems with a Pi3 , Prostick, and filter, they would have performance equal to the FF V7 (excluding the screen display and packaging)?