After a lot of work, I finally beat my own record for planes seen. It was from July 2017 at 1121 planes.
With 5 minutes to go until 24:00 UTC, the count is at 1156 planes. I missed 45 minutes of decodes yesterday, during the busiest period of the day here. It could easily have been 80 planes more.
Looks like it’s really not that much about indoor or outdoor, it depends more on the mount place itself.
I have made some tests with my current indoor setup and brought the antenna outdoor for several hours through the opened window.
The fact that i can’t go that high as indoor under the roof is the explanation why the performance of my setup is more worse if mounted outdoor.
I would need a mast of approx 8 meter to achieve the same height for the antenna.
As i’ve reached my max also from geographical perspective, i leave it as it is now.
The number of aircraft is a thing which mainly depends on the region. You will find trackers in the middle of nowhere with a range of > 400 NM, but there are only 30-40 visible based on the traffic there.
That’s my situation too. My 2 close-by airports have minimal traffic but I am “under” one major air lane for US east coast and another two are some 100 miles west of me.
Extending the range in my case added more reported positions but not proportionally so many planes.
The only way I can get more planes is to get closer of NYC or Philadelphia.
I am by the red circle close to KORF.
Note that to east of me the traffic is very weak. If some looks at my antenna positions pattern it would think I have some big obstacle that way. Partially is true, but I am not really loosing too much…
Some of those (like the one linked above) are fake, combination of two radar stations in one feeder, to climb in the stats.
Also, as an experiement, on FR24, I was able to create a site on my Windows machine that was mirroring the data from my Pi, but I manually put the location like 200 miles away from me. It sure showed that station having 400 miles range (loopsided in one direction of course). That’s how some people there climb in stats, so I stopped worrying about that.
For planes at 40,000 feet, the line of sight “horizon” is at 400 km, not 400 nm. RF horizon is slightly larger (some 450 km), but still less than 400 nm = 740 km.
Can you confirm it is a real plane that was possibly there at that time.
S.
Edit
For quite some time i ran ADSBscope on the output from the Pi.
Reasonably frequently i would get a point plotted about 500NM away.
ADSBscope gave me a unique ICAO identifier and i could work out if it was a real plane that may have been there at that time. The majority could not be confirmed. Occasionally, i got one that looked probable.
Some were not listed aircraft and some which were real ICAO numbers were not on my side of the world at that time.
I was being facetious around the observation (and I realize that sarcasm and related comments do not come across in writing). With that, it does occasionally happen that I see aircraft well beyond the heywhatsthat line of sight (and yes, they are really there). Beyond that I have seen a few very far out ones like the 350nm today, but never bother check if they are real.
In this particular case? Who knows. I am not using timelapse and after your question, I checked Planefinder. There was nothing reported at that distance. My usual max distance is around the 250-280nm. Odds are it is a fluke. I was not trying to promote that 350nm is a normal distance for me.
I saw your graph and just wanted to know if it was real.
Heywhatsthat is just an estimation and as we know is not a hard and fast rule.
I have no doubt that 350 is possible. I was just pointing out that the majority of what i see out over 400NM is not real and I was wanting other opinions.
I wouldn’t mind having a normal max of 250-280 but i am a flat lander and i can’t get the antennae up above the local impediments.
ADSBscope does give me a 12 hour time lapse with an identity. These aircraft are often in Central Australia or over the Great Australian Bight where there are no ADSB trackers so Planefinder and others are of no use.
If it was the one he sent me a screenshot from, it was a very confused transponder courtesy of BCS Eurotrans (DHL Leipzig).
They have their transponders programmed atrociously wrong or it’s just bad tech, i don’t know.
On a single feeder; no funny business.
