Calling BS on 15k airplanes / day

Good :exclamation:

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
ATTRIBUTION: LEWIS CARROLL (Charles L. Dodgson), Through the Looking-Glass, chapter 6, p. 205 (1934). First published in 1872.

C’mon OBJ…I’m so disappointed in you! You are the recognized rockstar in this subject matter and you’ve chosen to run away from what would ordinarily be a slam dunk in your worldwide court. These data vandals are making a mockery of what has been a years long example of your pristine record keeping for thousands of contributors who correctly collect and transmit their information. Surely you can’t sit back and accept that these new jokers practicing creative data routing and aggregation of (by your own admission) low quality data deserve the #1 spot in your authoritative list after only a few days of acceptable trickery.

So far, only one gentlemen in this thread has exhibited any sensibility on this subject (myself excluded, of course), and that is the original poster who correctly described this new phenomenon as bullshit. I hope it can be sorted out…I cast a vote of no confidence in the Top 10 today.

Uh, no, you have entirely the wrong end of the stick. There is no vandalism going on here, the data is fine. As I said above I’m not interested in revisiting arguments about what stats should show - past experience is that it’s never going to please everyone and I have lost interest in trying to make a square peg fit in a round hole.

If you think something should change with stats, you could raise that with Eric or the ADS-B support team, but I’m the wrong person to try to convince.

Nah. Still not buying it.

I don’t think the upgrades exist that could bring KSFO hits in any significant quantity to my neighborhood. I get some KSFO-bound traffic along the coast and across my northern edge of reception but nothing crazy. This is typical of the range I get now:
https://c1.staticflickr.com/5/4286/35251743302_d12f98bd12_c.jpg
I have pretty good reach along the N to NE arc with 300+ pretty common and 324.5 the best I’ve witnessed. As you can see, not so much towards KSFO. 250 is about it.

Modeling it on HeyWhatsThat with a 1000’ mast for my antenna still doesn’t get me there. I tried 5000’ too, saw that didn’t make it either and threw in the towel. There are some mountains in the way that cause problems. I only see the high flyers past the Tehachapi’s.
https://c1.staticflickr.com/5/4240/35288506821_c5b2813bc4_c.jpg

This screenshot doesn’t show the aircraft ID but the light purple track under Modesto is a U2 at 60000+ ft. This is the closest I’ve seen anything get to KSFO.
https://c1.staticflickr.com/5/4227/35378813916_e72ac5632a_c.jpg

Which leads me to this.

No, we’re not getting that level of KSFO traffic anywhere around here (and judging from the kind of numbers I see the LAX locals get, they probably don’t see that much KSFO traffic in San Francisco either). I checked the rogue site using HeyWhatsUp to see if there was anything occluding me but not him. No, it’s pretty similar. I have a 400’ altitude advantage that helps me a little but nothing significant. The airport is 345 miles away from me and perhaps 360 miles away from him. Consequently, I don’t think your statement can be correct.

I’m not familiar at all with aggregating data for airplane tracking purposes but I can ponder the concept and make a few suppositions. I hope this logic holds up to scrutiny.

Aggregated data will have to reflect the site(s) the data originated at. Without getting into the philosophical debate, “legitimate aggregated data” should therefore show the arithmetic sum by heat-map location of the various data sets that were aggregated. If I combined two data sets and both contained 100 positions in the North 250+ sector I would expect to see 200 positions in that sector when looking at the aggregate. Aggregated data should look like regular data, just more of it. This does not look like regular data to me.
https://c1.staticflickr.com/5/4223/35289304711_f6d71fbba0_b.jpg

I don’t care how many sites you stack together, a KVCV locale won’t see a 260k spike of hits in that location. I really question the validity of the data you’re getting from your #2 (my neighbor) and #1 (Mr St. Louis) contributors. I get that you don’t want to miss any data but this data is flawed. As I said earlier, I watched the site ramp up. The site operator had two radios, one with a good setup and one with a punk setup (as do I and many others, no disrespect for that). The good setup is still in operation and getting the same kind of numbers as always. The punk setup was punk for a couple of days and then appeared to get aggregated with the good one. Good numbers + punk numbers added together and were distributed properly across the heat-map. That caught my attention. After a few days of that tomfoolery is when it went completely rogue. The rest of the map kept the two-receiver aggregated numbers seen before but the NW 250+ sector started exploding. It sure seems like additional manipulation of the data began then and continues now. From my perspective, you’re getting illegitimate aggregated data and your system is getting gamed.

Can it be a high gain Yagi antenna? The directivity pattern is about right (for two receivers overlapped).
I saw a number of sites in the same condition.

I’ve said this twice so far and I don’t know how else to say it.

It is data aggregated from several receivers
One of the receivers is probably close to SFO. It is not just a bunch of receivers all at the same place!
The positions near SFO are close enough to the nominal “site location” that those positions are not thrown out.

Think of it as plotting all the positions received from many receivers on a map, then drawing a circle around one “site position” and only counting positions that fall into that circle.

I agree 100%

This type of aggregation of data should not be permitted at least as far as applying to the running statistics.

JMO

If there are multiple receivers showing as one, just to gain better score, it might upset others. Perception is all, and I think it is bad policy, even if in this case I don’t really care.

Against my better judgment, I’m going to throw out a couple of observations:

The ultimate data aggregation is Flightawere, so they should list themself as #1.

Flightaware is located in Houston, so they would be #1 in the Houston area; but they get the data from all over the world, so the location in the statics/ranking means nothing.

I use the stats to judge how well my radio, antenna, filter, etc are performing. Will the stats continue to give me this information, yes but I will have to filter the data now.

Who does not like to be #1? Will I ever get there? No, and not now unless I figure out how to aggregate data, and have more friends than the other guy that knows how to aggregate data. (I assume that if you are smart enough that any system that has this data on it can be shared).

Will I loose any sleep? No, but if aggregate data is used for ranking and stats, the location of this data should be reflected, or that it’s from multiple locations of the wolrld.

Maybe a new stat list can be created “Aggregate Data”. Flightaware #1. They deal with a lot of data, allow us to see data, track our airplanes, give mlat data back to us, and more. It is Flightaware’s sand box, so they can make the rules for the game they created. There are loopholes in rules, which create more rules. The ranking system is somewhat based on location, which is becoming grey, and will continue to darken with the aggregate data loophole.

I’m probably all wet on this one but…

Peace out.

I wonder if aggregating the data doesn’t mess up the MLAT for neighbours.

If this practice of aggregating data is legitimate, then show all of us how to do it.

modesmixer2 with a feed from several receivers or better adsbexchange.com all over the world… :slight_smile:

I have 8 receivers, so I could also aggregate them… Thought about to make a new account with an aggregated link just for fun and also climbing to the top :slight_smile: But I am interested in how every receeiver performs to the neighbour receivers… Also a bit of a challenge just to see how to improve the reception…

But it’s all just for fun anyway… So if somebody wants to be #1… Ok… They will get rich… sometimes, somewhere… maybe :wink:

It’s mostly about racking up psychic brownie points. If this is what it takes for them to get their 15 minutes of fame, they are more to be pitied than censured. :bulb:

For maximum effect, one can sell house, quit job and move next to a major airport (JFK for example) and aggregate 10 PiAware.
Then will rack up some fame. No fortune thou :laughing:

I peaked at #5 with a homemade antenna on a fiberglass mast 30’ up in the air. I have since moved the ADS-B antenna down lower because I wanted to use that LMR-400 run for a ham radio antenna. After seeing this garbage, I have zero desire to get my ADS-B station back up to bigger numbers. I thought that’s why the stats were broken up between sites and users. Oh well.

Crickets…

The data is more useful to us if there is a site per physical receiver. If you want to aggregate your data, it’s better to do it after feeding piaware, not before; if you do it before feeding piaware then distant positions will be discarded and mlat won’t work. There are various existing tools that aggregate multiple data feeds into a single display, e.g. dump1090 in --net-only mode, modesmixer, VRS. Configuration is left as an exercise for the reader.

Sweet.

Are feeds processed differently at the moment? The range of the top 2 guys seems limited to their own garden and they can use their hands to count the planes?

Could it be related to this?

Those feeds went from just unusual to actually misconfigured and causing additional problems. We’re trying to work with them to resolve some issues.