Long distances...

Hello,
this morning I see something interesting. A aircraft started from Billund (danmark) only a few hundred metres from airport.
Billund is just before my 200nm range circle. Never saw this before. My lowest VRS range circle show me this direction and also to Copenhagen airport.

Anyone know about weather / clouds or something what could be the reason?

Ludger

From both the documentation and from my own experience, VRS doesn’t show you the absolute farthest range on the circles. I have planes showing up 25-30 NM farther out than what VRS records the maximum range at. There’s some reason they log it this way, the author explains it on his website.

Radio waves absolutely propagate differently in weather, day/night, bouncing off objects, etc. One day you’ll pick a plane up at 300 NM, the next day there’s no hope of that.

Some days I can pick up planes landing at the local international airport and show them on the ground, the next day I lose them at 200 feet up, but I’m only 25 NM away from the airport.

One day I can talk to France with a piece of 20 foot long coax in my backyard just strung in a tree, the next day it’s just static.

There are no guarantees when it comes to RF :wink:

VE6ADF (can you tell I’m a pilot and a ham? hee hee)

Just looked at a DX cluster at 23 cm. There are some long distance calls around 700km. So it can be that I saw a plane starting in 200nm distance.

Few weeks ago I had more Spain radio stations than German in my car radio (sporadic e)

DG9BJA but not a pilot…

It is still happening. Get ground position from airport billund and other…

Now that my ADS-B antenna is outside I am seeing flights 200-250 NM away that do not come to our airport. I don’t even have a filter on it yet.

Although I got lazy tonight and split the antenna so I could listen to some local EDACS so I’m sure my range got cut down.

I already skinned my knee putting that antenna up, the next one can wait until it heals :laughing:

Must be something in the air today. Seeing several this morning in the 300+ NM range.

Yesterday (July 4th) was the lowest number of positions and aircraft seen since I’ve been running PP. I guess nobody’s going anywhere on the 4th, they’re already where they want to be.
But as to the longer distance loggings, it may be because there is less radio traffic covering up the weaker signals.

Seeing aircraft’s starting off in a distance of 200-250nm could be a result of rainscatter.

Suppose rain scatter could do it, but in that case the tracking would not be continuous, just here and there.
But if another, closer, aircraft is covering it up it might just start to track the outlier when the offending bird got out of the way.