FlightAware Discussions

Flight aware on moving vehicle... hear me out! :)

FlightAware General
#1

I showed my parents recently the flightaware project. They asked an odd question. Could it be used on the road?

My parents are over the road truckers. So we started to wonder. Instead of the “base station” having a static lat/long. Is it possible to have that updated via gps? I know there is a potential for some accuracy loss, which is what we discussed. But they criss-cross the country constantly. They like the idea of being able to contribute location data back, but also like the idea of being able to see flight info for craft around them while on the road.

Thanks!

#2

If you disable MLAT there really is no issue in not knowing the position.
And MLAT on a moving vehicle just doesn’t work even with updates via GPS.
(i’m not saying it’s impossible in general but the mlat-client isn’t coded to support frequent position updates)

In fact i would recommend against entering a position at all, that way there are no issues like dump1090-fa filtering positions further than 360 nmi from the current location.

ADS-B ground positions won’t work but all the other ADS-B stuff will work just fine without a reference location.

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#3

so when they go to look at the map to see what’s around, would that map still need to know their location? Or does the map use a different location identification?

#4

The map should get the location from the GPS dongle.

#5

I don’t think that’s currently implemented.
You’d need to restart the device regularly for the map location to be updated.

Well they would need to zoom out, look where planes are and that’s obviously where they are as well :slight_smile:
So it wouldn’t display their location at all but the location of the planes they are tracking.

I’ve now heard multiple requests for something like this … maybe i’ll make something happen for my readsb fork (a dump1090-fa fork) … together with tar1090.
No promises.
Anyhow as i described it will work just fine and you can also feed FA without giving a location i believe.

#6

@obj should have the definitive answer, however, I thought it had been working for a year or two. It just needed GPSD to be configured and running correctly.

#7

There’s already number on ships that can/do move.

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