My home feeder has problems seeing low-altitude traffic at my GA airport. So, I stood up a separate feeder that is currently inside of my hangar. Putting aside the fact that the antenna is inside of a big metal box at the moment, I am able to receive limited traffic, including ground positions as planes taxi around in the vicinity of the hangar and airborne traffic within a few miles of the airport. My plans are to get an antenna mounted on the outside once the initial experiment is complete.
Some questions:
- Should traffic from a new feeder station be included in the public website or firehose?
- Is there a delay between when a new feeder comes online and when its data is utilized by FlightAware? Like a probationary period?
- Is surface movement data filtered out of the firehose for smaller airports?
From inside the hangar, I can connect to Skyaware locally and visualize the traffic in real-time (including surface movement data). I am dual-feeding to ADS-B Exchange and can see my traffic there, too (including surface movement data). But, I don’t see a way to verify if my data is making it to the public FA site (especially the surface positions, which is a focus of the feeder for this experiment).
I also tried using Foreflight’s “Internet Traffic” layer, which I believe just consumes the firehose. They display ground traffic at major airports, so I was hoping that they would also display ground traffic from ADS-B feeders near smaller airports.
(I realize that their software is outside of the scope of this forum, but because they display traffic sourced from FlightAware, my hopes are to be able to visualize both low-altitude and ground traffic from my on-airport feeder using their software).