I’ve just started using a Pi and feeding to Flightaware in the last few days. Early days and just playing around with the antenna in the loft at the moment but currently making an external one.
Anyway back to my question I’m wondering why so many of the aircraft that I pick up are not tied-up to a registration in the data fields?
I understand some executive jet movements have their registrations “blocked” but I’m talking about Airliners here on scheduled flights where I click on a flight number and when clicking on that to see more detail, quite often both the registration and type have “n/a” listed, is there a reason for that??
Executive jets (or any other aircraft) don’t have any information ‘blocked’ from their ADS-B transmission - only from being published on some websites.
Not every ADS-B message contains ‘all’ information, so your station simply may not be reliably decoding the messages with the missing info.
Getting you antenna out in the open may provide great improvement
(record your ‘messages per second’ for before and after a significant system change)
That sounds reasonable but what I’m not understanding, is that if I’m receiving the mode-S Hexcode for these aircraft [which I am] is that not enough information to be able to display at least the registration when I click on the hex? A couple of examples below.
I do have access to a good database, so can look up n/a but it rather defeats the object of feeding to a site where I thought the aircraft would be matched to the hexcodes?
The SkyView is open source and it seems they don’t want to provide a database for it.
Or rather they can’t provide any of the database data they are using because of the license.
The only feeding service having current database information in their local mapview is planefinder i believe.
(you could do it like the 3d viewer and get the pfclient aircraft.json as well and combine both plane tables in javascript. I’ve actually thought about coding something like that for SkyView because i don’t like SkyView better than the local pfclient map)
I suppose you could make a feature request that for the aircraft you are feeding you feed client is provided some database information.
(Not sure how you could implement that in a server friendly way. Maybe with areas and basic database information for all planes in an area it could be done without providing each feeder with an individual database limited to aircraft received which would be cost prohibitive probably)
It’s really annoying and the problem is only going to get worse as the database provided with SkyView isn’t updated.
So there is some explanation by @obj on the topic (he develops dump1090-fa). I can’t find his comments on the forum right now.
But there is a Readme on the topic located here:
dump1090/tools/README.aircraft-db.md at 6c055c8c23a4c72195bdc210e9e3069c8f64387e · flightaware/dump1090 · GitHub
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The tl;dr is that Skyview includes aircraft data for the subset of the FlightAware database that we’re allowed to release publicly. It gets updated periodically, usually with each dump1090-fa release (I didn’t have time to do it for 3.7.0 unfortunately). If you have other datasources then you can regenerate your own copy to include that data.
Thanks, being completely new to using a pi for flight tracking and feeding, I really have no idea how I would go about that.