Daily Position Counts

[islepilot]

Hi,

I have been running my tracking station for many years and have usually had pretty good performance. I have a homemade 1/4 wave ground plane which is amplified due to a long run of RG6. I use the FA Blue dongle into a Pi running the Debian version of 3.8.1.

For a while now I have noticed I am no longer the top feeder in my area. Others get a few more aircraft, but they have significantly higher position counts. All of the feeders with stats better than mine seem to use the SDCard version of PiAware. Is this just coincidence or is there something better about the SDCard version that accounts for the higher position counts?

Are there settings I should check? Gain seems to be the most important knob, and if I set it too high, my message rates plummet as I generally have a lot of nearby GA traffic. If I set it low, I lose a lot of range (before many GA aircraft had ADSB I regularly had traffic out to 250 mm, but now with lower gains I see little outside of 150 nm).

My site is 72026. Any ideas what I should try?

https://flightaware.com/adsb/stats/user/islepilot

Thanks,
Keith

[foxhunter]

As far as i know there’s a formula somewhere documented here how the ranking is calculated based on different values.

[islepilot]

My concern isn’t about the rankings per se, but more about why or how others nearby have similar flight counts, but double the position counts.

[foxhunter]

Also similar message count and range? Did you check their profiles, maybe you can find some jumps upwards there which explain the change.

[islepilot]

By message count I presume you mean position count? That is my specific concern and my numbers are about half of the top stations. This has been going on for a long time so there are no jumps visible in the profiles. I have tried to contact the other users to see if they would share their setup info, but I haven’t received any responses.

[foxhunter]

yes, i mean the position count.