while thinking about how to further improve mlat in my neighborhood (50-100) miles around my site - and especially for lower altitude aircrafts i had this idea. no one can better estimate where in a region new mlat sites would bring the biggest advantage than the flightaware mlat-servers.
so - how about a map that tells us feeders where new sites were best placed. that way we could see if friends living in this area could be encouraged to feed flightaware.
that’s true - no planes/no sites = no data on your servers i just came from my situation here in bavaria/germany and overlooked this aspect that in other regions of the world theses problems exist.
the feeder-sites map in the earlier version some years ago i found a little bit better to use. but yes this is a quite good indicator where problems with missing sites are. the coverage map over here isn’t very helpful - see picture. maybe an slider-option for 5000-10000 and 0-5000 would improve.
but with improving i not only meant to just get mlat position but to improve speed of first computed position and precision especially for aircrafts that maneuver hard.
but to be clear - i’m really happy with how fa-mlat today works - even so it would be nice for watching the small private aircrafts, sailplanes and military jets one little ‘bug’ regarding this where are sites near me i found. i like to see where other sites are located - but had to set mine to 10 km range because 1km and 5km both pointed directly to my house within 100 meters or so. the algorithm here should get improved a little as others now are copletely misled where my site is.
Re the accuracy setting, the same rounded position will show up for all sites within ~1km or ~5km so you’re not actually leaking information (well… you wouldn’t be, except that you posted that you’re close to the rounded location)
yep - what most would expect with a switch like this is:
set to 1km - in no case nearer than 300m to real position
set to 5km - in no case nearer than 1.500m to real position
set to 1km - in no case nearer than 3000m to real position
because those who do not investigate the ‘secrets’ behind the algorithm would find my house by accident
what i’m wondering when looking at feeder-sites-map is. in the uk and neatherlands ther are much more sites than here in the south of germany. how is mlat working over there - they must have very smooth tracks and mlat working down to 1000 feet above ground?
I forgot to mention one thing. Our coverage map displays altitude above sea level and not ground level.
You would need to know the ground level of the area you are interested in to know if FA is missing low altitude coverage.
This problem is very apparent around really tall mountains like the Alps in Europe, the Rocky mountains in US, and the Himalayan north of India.
thanx for this advice! the problem for me with the coverage map is - that i’m mostly interested in all the small private aircrafts like cessnas, sailplanes and military jets. they fly mostly at 1,000-5,000 feet.
so it would be graet if there were two different altitude settings added e.g. 3,000 and 6,000 feet to the existing 10,000 and above steps - maybe one or two additional zoom-levels too.
because what i see now (picture in thread above) does not help to determine where sites are missing
i just came from my situation here in bavaria/germany and overlooked this aspect that in other regions of the world theses problems exist.