So I setup my first flight feeder at a home I have on the west side of Lake Okeechobee, Florida, and installed a remote antenna on my roof. I am picking up a ton of traffic up to 250 miles away but I am confused by a few things on the flight tracking map that i have not found explained anywhere.
On my SkyAware local feed, i see aircraft all displayed in a solid track line; however, flights that are VERY or directly overhead are showing up as a dashed line until they are at some distance away. I am assuming that this is because the signal may be too strong and overloading the feed?
On the SkyAware web app (from my residence over 100 miles away) when I turn on "show all tracks, I see aircraft all over the place near and far with track lines that are solid, then go to dashed then back to solid and so on… There is no rhyme or reason so I am wondering if my feed is just filling in the blanks whether far away or directly overhead?
If the above assumptions were true, would it not be more beneficial for the community for me to reduce the gain (I have not researched how yet) so that the lower flying planes in my area are prioritized over those hundreds of miles away that are easily picked up my city feeders?
Hope this makes sense, I am still learning the ropes…
Directly overhead and very close by signals tend to overload the receiver. Dotted lines indicate a estimated flight-path based on historical data, in case of a dotted line your receiver is not in contact with the aircraft at that point in time.
Same goes for the Skyaware web app, dotted lines indicate that the aircraft is not detected by your antenna and and the programs then uses estimated tracks based on historical data for the same flight.
The choice to prioritize local aircraft over distant aircraft is totally your to make.
In this post you can find the tools and the steps you might want to take in order to get the gain set correctly:
Thank you for your insight. To clarify when I access SkyAware locally, Skyaware does appear to track 99% of aircraft (except lower flying aircraft directly above) whereas when SkyAware web is accessed from a non-local (WAN) the same majority of aircraft are shown with a combination os solid and broken lines in their paths as shown in my screenshot. Is there an issue with my transmission of my data to FA, or does FA just pick and choose packets of data from its feeder network? My Pi is only showing less than 10% cpu load and I have 20mbps upstream bandwidth available…. I would imagine FA would probably prefer my data from my remote location over data I am picking up from major cities a 100 miles away where there are multiple.feeders in their network.
The difference between the local Skyaware display and the Skyaware anywhere Web display is that the first one is using the data generated from your own reciever. It shows all aircraft, no filtering is used.
The data displayed by the Skyaware Anywhere Web display is generated by the FA server ( not your local feeder) and it will filter out the blocked aircraft for example (Aircraft owners can request to be blocked from view).
So the lines shown there can be different then the ones you are seeing on your local display.
That has nothing to do with you feeder or your reporting to FA and the bandwidth available.
The serverside built display is slower on updating the postions ( the data has to travel to the server and back to your Skyaware Anywhere session) so there’s a delay in updating postions in comparison to your display from the feeder directly.
There is also a difference between SkyAware Anywhere and SkyAware from your local network.
Your local instance will always show everything, so you get the entire track the RPi picks up. I don’t know why, but SkyAware Anywhere will show those same solid lines as dashes. If you go to your house on the lake, you even watch them in two browser tabs as one shows solid lines and the other shows dashes. You can also see a huge difference in your message count. My SkyAware at home will show, say, 50+ messages per second, but when viewing on SkyAware Anywhere it will be 2.1 messages per second.
FlightAware staff would have to explain why there’s a discrepancy.
EDIT: I see where @tomvdhorst explained exactly this in his next message.
