My Flight Feeder for Android updated itself to 1.0.20 yesterday and since then I have noticed about a 50% drop in positions.
My PiAware stats from the same location have not changed, so I know it’s not due to a drop in traffic at my location.
Has anyone else noticed this? Maybe the better question would be… Is anyone else interested enough in the Android version to have noticed this drop in positions? I only ask after looking at the “big” map of all FF for Android sites and don’t really see anyone with any sort of significant stats on their sites.
I have just rebooted my device and will see if that has any effect.
Version 1.0.20 of the app now includes similar code to PiAware, which verifies that an aircraft’s position is within a reasonable range of your receiver - less than 300 NM. We’ve observed some aircraft with errant transponders which yield impossible positions. This check will filter those out and generally leads to better plots on the web map.
PiAware (and now the app) also performs a staleness check on the other dynamic data we care about - altitude, heading and speed. Before data is reported back to us, these parameters must be less than 30 seconds old.
Basically, the drop in reporting rate is intentional, but the data that does get sent is of much higher quality.
In the past, the Android app had been posting double the positions and half the planes compared to PiAware for me. I will have to give it another go for comparison.
It wasn’t that we were getting a lot of bad position reports. Rather, we were simply getting too many. Sure, we were getting some bad ones, and we always will, even on PiAware. The update is simply meant to increase quality, which has the side effect of lowering the reporting rate. There is no loss of detection capability in the new version though. It can still see the same number of planes as it did before. But, for planes that it does see, we make sure the data “makes sense” before sending it in.
When we turn on MLAT in the app, the data quality will be significantly more important.
The reason for this is because PiAware had tighter restrictions on the liveness of the data. There are 4 main parameters we care about - position, speed, heading and altitude.
Both Android and PiAware had quality checks on the position, but PiAware was also doing additional checks on the other three. Version 1.0.20 of Android added those checks to Android.
Android may still report more data though, because the app is doing error correction, whereas PiAware is not.
Anyway you look at it, it’s still a GREAT app. Plus I like the mutibility features of distance in the list and rings on the map.
I also notice there is quite a difference in the messages / second display between the PiAware and FF for Android.
I’m suspecting the Android count is what is being sent to FA vs the PiAware count being messages received.
