I’m learning my way around the piAware details. One question I have is about why some details are not shown in the ‘popup’ display when I click on a plane icon.
Second question is the hack I’ve seen so that a mouse over shows the details, rather than having to click. Does that work with 3.3.0? If I install that patch, how does it work on a tablet? E.g. can I still “click” on an icon on the tablet to see the details?
I appreciate all the useful posts here - it was a huge help getting started.
The field you’re talking about is the ident/callsign field.
This is just an alphanumeric thing that’s loaded into the transponder for each flight and then transmitted in some Mode S / ADS-B messages.
In Europe this is fairly consistently set because it’s used for ATC. It will usually be the tail number or derived from the airline flight number. (often not exactly the flight number, because flight numbers can be very similar and easy to confuse so they reallocate callsigns in that case)
In the US it’s often not set at all (the “n/a” case) or wrong.
dump1090 works off local data only so generally if the aircraft’s not transmitting it, you won’t see it. The FlightAware page fuses several different datasources so can often give you more info.
Thanks obj. I wasn’t aware it was optional info. Would be nice if dump1090 could fetch that bit of data when needed (seems like some other tracking software does pull more info, but I’m not sure the impact on piAware performance.
