I’m seeing MLAT traffic like this, the messages and RSSI are updating, the aircraft is chatty, but all of the other data isn’t updating, it’s just frozen and intermittent. For periods of time it will update, and then freeze again for 5-10 minutes, but always the messages and RSSI will update, just nothing else.
Is this something I am doing wrong? or a general issue with MLAT?
Can anyone advise a good site to precisely generate location coordinates. I’ve tried 3 and they all give different answers when I click on my antenna It needs to have high resolution satellite imagery and a good desktop PC interface.
The fields that are updating frequently are probably the ones you are receiving directly. The others like speed, distance, heading, location etc are those which are calculated by the mlat server. They are updated less often, and it’s possible that the server does not have sufficient data to calculate the position continuously. It needs all involved receivers to get exactly the same message to calculate the position, so if some get lost or the signal is intermittent then the updates would be even less frequent.
Do you mean the location of your receiver? You could just use the GPS in your phone to get an accurate location.Google Earth should be good enough if you want to take the location from a map or satellite image. You don’t need absolute precision for mlat to work OK - within a few metres is fine.
As ever there is an xkcd about it:
In areas with high coverage the FA mlat-server will select certain receivers to calculate a position, if you’re unlucky your receiver is not used and you don’t get any position for MLAT planes even while you’re receiving them and the FA server is producing MLAT positions.
(Unless that has changed, i haven’t tested this for probably 2 years)
This is a distinct difference to some other aggregators which provide MLAT results.
FA somewhat compensates for this fact by providing results for i believe 3 minutes after your receiver was used to calculate a position, but it’s in no way a guarantee to get MLAT results for planes in your coverage.
It needs to have high resolution satellite imagery and a good desktop PC interface.