I agree that the display of the stats, especially the main table, is currently unclear and needs work.
This is a tongue-in-cheek comment but how about adding a “rarity” factor.
If the top 100 ranking sites suddenly switched off, would it make any difference to FA’s coverage?
But those locations in remote areas with few flights are never going to be high in the rankings. Importantly without the few receivers in those locations there would be a black hole in FA’s coverage. Hence are they more important to FA than the top 100?
I think I have 60+sites sharing data for MLAT so no one is going to miss my receiver if it went dark since they would cover my area in my absence.
I don’t know of a suitable “rarity” factor - perhaps divide the number of aircraft/flights by the number of receives also reporting the aircraft/flight? Or another pseudo-scientific approach.
Or better still, just go for the idea from “mgunther”. Then anyone interested can interpret the data as they wished without the public display of “mine’s bigger than yours”
goal: put all us sites in front
approach: (number of aircrafts x birthdate of programmer) + (square-root(3.1415926 + log(number of letters from programmers daily horoscope)))
result: et voila
Don’t be daft - why would that be a goal? I doubt Flightaware really care who is at the top of the table. The only reason US sites are higher now than they were is that previously most of the traffic they were seeing wasn’t counted, and now it is.
so - again - it’s totally fair to finally count mlat - but that this way of counting ads-b is nonsense you easily see in us ads-b decrease 25-30% while european 50-60%. that simple. i don’t care - but just have to laugh
MLAT based data?
Still, some top’s me with 0 Mlat reported.
I ain’t racing for first, but reading the score table (and this thread) do not give me more insight about the logic used.
I’d just be happy to see the actual number which the rank is based on. I’m happy for it to be a total unique aircraft per day thing though. Makes sense!
thanks at last, without the ‘Other’, I top the display sites in total of Aircraft.
Since this is not display it is very disturbing. http://i65.tinypic.com/28wnddg.png
Sorry, not for me it doesn’t. It’s in the name, FLIGHTAWARE. If I was plane spotting then yes I would agree.
I get multiple flights for the same a/c counted once.
RYR*** Leeds Bradford EGNM to Alicante LEAL then back. Then the same again, all on the same day. That’s four flights but counted once! Jet2 the same, Easyjet Bristol EGGD and back, two counted as one.
If I felt inclined to look I’m sure that Iberia, Air Europa, Air Nostrum, Air Berlin, Wizz and many others would all be under-counted in terms of flights!
It isn’t anything to do with the 30 day ranking, it just doesn’t make sense to me.
yep - that’s exactly what i meant when saying that here in europe the aircraft rotation plans are totally different to usa.
→ in europe they fly with the same aircraft mostly a to b and then b to a
→ in the us they fly a to b to c - and another aircraft makes the b to a
you see this as usa ads-b dropped by 25-30% - and european ads-b dropped 50-60%
the programmer said ‘they have so much more traffic over there’ - but i’m wondering where are the screens with around 400 aircrafts from one single location. they should have those often as they see so much more traffic than me
today morning - site sits under the roof in the attic with 1 foot snow on top:
@OBJ, yes that would be excellent if it can be done, but why will it be inaccurate?
@Tom I’m jealous, still waiting for the connectors to wire up my amp. Even then if I double the number of “flights” I see, still going to be about 20 times less than you.
phill. zero reason to be jealous. it’s just luck sitting on top of a tiny hill. and you have much better climate and lack in worlds most braindead government
We can accurately count the number of idents seen. That is not the same thing as accurately counting flights, for a number of reasons.
There is an assumption that a unique ident means a unique flight. For GA and private aircraft in Europe, the ident is commonly the tail number, so you will only count those once even for multiple flights.
If there is no ident seen at all for an aircraft, you do not know how many flights to count it as. Seeing an ident requires one of two things:
an ADS-B equipped transponder; or
a Mode S transponder and secondary radar that interrogates the ident.
In Europe, this works fairly consistently, but not 100%. Looking at my local receiver, about 95% of aircraft I see have an ident. The other 5% will be miscounted.
In the US, it is more like 50% (from memory) that have an ident. The other 50% will be miscounted. Also, idents are very inconsistently set compared to Europe; it is common to have idents that are just the bare flight number with no airline prefix, so they are no longer unique and you may count only a single flight for two or more aircraft. GA and regional flights (Mode S only) often don’t provide an ident at all; I suspect that either they’re just never set in the transponder, or secondary radar is not querying for it.
Counting idents on mlat traffic in the US is basically useless, because most things that you need mlat for aren’t sending an ident. A mlat/ads-b/other breakdown is hard to justify, since you’re counting close to 100% of ADS-B flights but close to 0% of MLAT flights.
But if you want the overall ident count anyway, despite the inaccuracies, I can see about getting that collected again.
Why is your message rate so high? I don’t get it anywhere near as high as that, even though I don’t have particularly fewer aircraft - typically I see a peak of around 200 in a day, but my message rate peaks at about 1600/sec. It seems like there is something limiting it to around that regardless of how many aircraft there are. In the summer I was seeing more aircraft, but not an appreciably higher message rate.
I suspect that the noise floor is the limiting factor. What is your receiver chain - are you using an LNA/filter etc?
:))) no worries, this is just the message rate from my aggregator/radarcape pi. my message rate peaks indoor (attic) at about 1,600 also. when i did some tests some days ago with outdoor (roof high) antenna it goes up to max 2,200 in these days. should be about 2,500 in summer season as munich airport and most of small private planes here in front of the alps reduce their flights over winter season extremely. tried the fa filter - but this is nonsense over here in europe - now using hab-amp + jetvision antenna with 2 feet coax.
edit: but when i look at your site data - i see one big difference that maybe is part of the thing too. your by far most traffic is very near - mine is mostly from between 100-200nm distance. maybe lots of strong/near signal interfere more/different ???
