Has the calculation of nearby station position stats changed? I have a station nearby that has lower positions than me every day, but is showing more positions than me in my Nearby Stations list.
I was under the impression that “Positions” stat was just the median number from the last day. If so how is their number greater when I have higher position numbers every day?
What gives?
I am pretty sure that it displays the median number from the last 7 days, (including today, which seems to give me some odd results early in the day when today’s number is low)
If that’s the case I don’t understand why I’m below another nearby station that has lower positions every day.
If you look at the reported positions for the last 7 last days, your score is the number mid way.
Put the numbers in order of size, remove the highest 3 numbers and the lowest 3 numbers, then your score is the remaining one.
The same is true of flights.
You may well be getting better numbers than him a lot of the time, but if he achieves 4 out of 7 days with a higher score, he “wins”.
They didn’t have lower positions every day. Look again, they had a higher number of positions on their median day. Looks like you were unlucky and had one bad day just when it mattered.
What number is being used for positions? Just ADS-B? Or the total position number?
All I believe.
Have a look at the numbers.
Because the rank is based on the aircraft count, not the position count.
(edit: ah, sorry, I misread your question; I thought by “higher” you meant rank)
Here is a screen cap of my stats for positions as of a few seconds ago:
If I order the values in the Total column from smallest to largest, I get
49,949
87,496
147, 150
177,120
232,546
290,160
314,974
If I throw away the 3 smallest values and the 3 largest values, the remaining value is 177,120. When I look at my Nearby Sites stats, I see:
So, it’s working exactly as described.
Ok I am going to revive my old topic again.
The stats of a user near me have gone crazy again. Double what they would generally get. Which has pushed them over me in my city. But nobody else around here, including myself, has seen any stats bump so it’s not based on traffic. Is the site tracking stats incorrectly or double counting? There simply isn’t enough traffic around here to have position counts like that even with a better SDR. I am already running an Airspy Mini and am almost being doubled on position count. Even though I see more flights than they do.
The site position-report counts are, unfortunately, no longer really comparable between different sites (mostly due to SkyAware Anywhere, which affects them when in use).
I don’t understand. Are you saying that having an open SkyAware Anywhere browser window will artificially boost your stats?
Yep, totally. By a lot.
The position report stats tell you how many reports piaware has uploaded. Think of it like a health/liveness/traffic monitor for the piaware->flightaware connection. It’s only loosely related to the amount of local data you receive and depends a lot on the characteristics of the aircraft traffic that your site sees (for example, maneuvering or low-flying aircraft generate reports at a higher rate). It’s never been particularly reliable for comparing sites because of this, and it’s not used in the site ranking.
When you have SkyAware Anywhere active, the FA servers ask piaware to increase the report rate for the sake of providing a better quality SkyAware view. That will show up in the reported stats.
If you want to monitor locally received traffic I would suggest using something like graphs1090 locally.
That’s a dirty trick! 
Maybe that’s why one my close-by neighbors suddenly climbed above my two stations!
Nah, it’s not used for ranking.
But it’s used to “rank” your nearby stations list on your own stats page. You are even highlighting the highest average position reports and the highest airplanes seen. And a lot of people use those stats to try to be the best station in their city or area. Or use them as comparison data when making changes to their setup to see if it’s been effective or not. So I am using that data on a local level to stay the top performing feeder. But I guess those days are over?
That’s what I was referring to, those highlighted fields.
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