I’d like to share a random thought with the FA staff: My team and I really appreciate airports that have coverage of taxiing aircraft. Power up alerts, taxi-out/in notifications, etc really help cut down on other communications and I’ve been pleasantly surprised that the extra data easily helps justify the price. This extra data has been unexpectedly helpful.
However, I’ve been quite surprised how few airports have this coverage despite the massive number of receivers in operation from TEB to PNS (neither of which seem to have good taxi coverage, btw).
Presumably everyone maximizes gain for long range, but very few seem to dedicate a low-gain receiver for on-airport coverage. I assume that since only aircraft/global gold & fbo subscribers have access to taxi data, no one else really seems to miss it. Perhaps you could add an additional ranking category like “total ground/taxi positions” or “unique aircraft” to help gather more diverse data than pushing everyone towards maximizing gain. There seems to be so much duplication in coverage from off-airport receivers, that most on-airport ones could stand to be quite low-gain
It’s just a random thought I wanted to share, but maybe I can convince others to dedicate old hardware to very low gain on-airport receivers!
It is less an issue of gain, and more one of location. You really need line of sight coverage of an airport for reliable reception of targets on the ground. Because the horizon is only a few miles on the ground, antenna height is very important. I’m only 8 miles from London City and I can only see aircraft on the ground there if they are in a particular part of the airport where there is an unobstructed view. So to get reliable coverage of an airport it would likely need several receivers virtually on site.
I don’t think that the gain is the problem but more the problem with visibility.
A perfect example is a Radarcape device close to the Airport in Frankfurt. This one only receive ground aircraft in EDDF because it is mounted on top of a Skyscraper,
i don’t understand this at all. i routinely receive ground data from my local airport (KUOX) but it never shows on the main FA page. i also never see ground data from KMEM. maybe FA receives this data but doesn’t broadcast?
