Hi!
It is important to keep ADS-B station volunteers motivated, especially those providing coverage in areas where no alternatives exist: a receiver in a sparsely populated area can provide unique coverage, while an aircraft over a densely covered region may already be tracked by dozens of stations.
For this reason, I think it would be valuable to introduce a metric and a public leaderboard that reflects each station’s actual contribution to worldwide coverage.
For example, each aircraft could be worth 60 points per minute, with those points divided equally among all stations tracking it during that minute. This would naturally reward unique or difficult-to-obtain coverage while assigning less value to data already received by many stations.
Such a system would encourage volunteers to deploy and maintain receivers in underserved areas.
What do you think?
I think it would be a great idea and i don’t want to take anything away from those who are able to legitimately Receive huge numbers of aircraft.
Personally, i think number of aircraft rather than number of position reports is the important metric.
A few years ago i had a friend and partner living on Coca-Keeling Island out in the Indian ocean many hundred of miles from any other receivers. It was a waypoint for many flights to and from Australia to the Middle East etc that were not tracked anywhere else. I set up a piaware receiver there.
There were no other receivers within range to calculate MLAT.
It lead to finding a number of software bugs that were not found in other places because there were many other receivers around.
For instance the first plane in my list was not reported even though i could see it in skyaware. If there was only one plane it was not reported, nothing.
Having a receiver isolated in the middle of nowhere definitely has its advantages and should be acknowledged.
S.
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I’ve proposed something extremely similar before. I say this as someone who usually hovers in the top 50-100 under this site’s current ranking system. (current ranking is suffering due to a recent multi-day power outage)
Your suggestion to weigh value by number of receivers tracking the same plane would be probably more computationally intensive than it’s really worth.
ADSBexchange has a feeder ranking system that rewards unique locations and proximity to airports. Still not enough to overcome the “geography hack” of densely populated areas with high volumes of air traffic.
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