I fly G-BGXR and the adsb return is from a skyecho 2. This worked until October which is the last flight I can find. I thought that the skyecho was the problem but I searched a bit harder and I can find todays flight on adsb exchange but not flightaware.
It was 15.30 egbo vacinity.
I have flown just about every other week since october. The problem seems to be flightaware.
Any ideas?
Hi,
Where do you place the unit while in flight?
Are there FlightAware stations in your area with very good low altitude range?
Mark
From the website: https://uavionix.com/products/skyecho/
With 20W transmit power, your 1090MHz ADS-B signal can be received up to 40NM away.
What are the important things to do, to optimize performance?
SkyEcho does not transmit the same power as a “normal” ADS-B capable transponder, so will not have the same range as a transponder.
We heard data for this recent flight, but hyperfeed decided not to ever create a flight for it due to your ADS-B transponder type:
GBGXR handle_position_adhoc: non-transponder positions cannot create an adhoc flightplan
(a “non-transponder” position is data from ADS-B DF18 messages, which are typically transmitted by ground vehicles, stationary obstacles, etc – things without a full transponder – but as in your case there are also some edge cases for light GA where the ADS-B transmitter is not integrated with a Mode S transponder)
This is probably the wrong decision; I’ll raise a ticket with flight tracking to see if we can relax that condition. (Done; you can reference issue FT-9185 if you need to chase this)
It may be misco figured my end. Will check aircraft tyoe setting.
The aircraft category was A1 (“Light <15500 lbs”) which is AFAIK correct.
Agreed that is what it is set to.
The skyecho adsb software was updated november which I thought may have caused an issue but from what I can see it is working ok and thats just a coincidence.
It matters to me because it gives other aircraft visibility of me which is a safety thing.
Now, there are quite a lot of people using skyecho 2 hardware because the caa funded the adoption. So its a bit odd that its not been cropping up.
Its in the middle of a huge window at the rear of the aircraft where its worked well for last 3 years. Usually we get pretty good coverage even in the circuit but most of my flights depart the zone and go 3000ft or so.
Air to ground vs air to air
Line of sight will no doubt differ given you don’t have external lower antennas. And from what Obj suggests, Ground stations (who aren’t the ones you are trying to avoid) are filtering/looking for full slightly different GPS ADSB - so probably won’t be working the same as a counterparts same model, or airborne TCAS / receiver?.
Not sure if its related but the firmware its using now has sda = 1 whereas before I updated it it was 0. Thats because rules have recently changed.
Your config looks fine, the problem lies on our side.
I looked into the cause a little more and it looks like in October we made a change to fix a separate flight tracking problem where we would receive garbage data from non-transponder transmitters that would trigger erroneous flight creation. To fix that we started trusting non-transponder data less. Unfortunately that then broke your case… Hopefully the flight tracking team can come up with a solution that finds a middle ground between the two.
Just add.
if(id==0x401E01)
track_flight = true;
Then my notification emails will work again!
FT-9185
Where do I chase this?
You can contact customer service via one of the methods at Contact Information - FlightAware
But to temper your expectations here - CS can’t fix this, the underlying problem needs attention by the Flight Tracking team, who do have a long list of stuff that they work through…
In theory a fix for this is now live. Can you check after your next flight to verify that it’s working again?
This is good news. I will try this probably this weekend.
For last weekend, I flew Sunday around 14:00 - 15:00 and on my way back to EGBO I saw a contact very late on the screen but never saw anything out the window. I think it was within 150ft in the opposite direction but if we have the data I’d like to know what or who that was. Since I can’t find my data I have to guess, and I saw another aircraft depart which went north to Manchester Barton.
Its good news that we properly support the sky echo because it turns out that there are thousands of those in use and some aerodromes have suggested making it mandatory for locally based aircraft. Which is a good idea, although some will think thats big brother.
I have conducted a flight:
[Flight Track Log ✈ G-BGXR 12-Mar-2023 - FlightAware]
The flight path is quite wrong. I expect patchyness at low level or missing a few points if there are tight turns but it shows turns that did not happen and in the wrong location. Previously it wouldn’t pick you up until you were about 1000ft and then perhaps lose you as you get below 500ft on final approach.
The actual flight KML file is here:
[https://www.jcross.co.uk/files/202303121127.kml]
I have not changed, the location of the skyecho it has good view of the sky.
Maybe this is as good as its going to get. I don’t fully understand the way that location is fused in flight aware but for this example at least its not done well.
Its not transmitting the wrong location, adsbexchange seems to have captured it.
so we know at least that the data was good and that the ADSB was visible.
I’m not sure I understand the problem, our data seems consistent with the adsbx data, which points are wrong?
The runway in use is 22. Top right to bottom left, we departed straight out. ADSBX struggles to pick us up until we reach a reasonable height above high ground, just south of the A458 - which is as you’d expect. Then the weather was rubbish so I did a left turn round the 449 and then approached from the south to do a standard overhead join, descending left turn to be parallel to 22 whilst descending, then cross to the circuit and downwind for 22. Then I turn finals and the weather doesn’t cooperate so I did a go around. This time, a pesky cessna 172 cuts in front and I have to extend over swindon, then turn final and do an s turn to give the slower cessna time to clear the runway. At about 300ft there are no more pings (again as expected). That is entirely consistent with the KML track.
FlightAware, doesn’t pick up the first half of the flight at all which I think is something to do with whatever decides its a trackable flight. Then on the first go around it plots a southerly track that doesn’t exist. But looking at the timestamps, there is 11:48:44 then 11:52:46 and its just joined the dots. What that will be is that we’ve descended below the point where we can be seen and then on the downwind for 22 we get back to 1000ft again and you can see us again.
Thats probably ok as its an edge case that presumably could be improved with an ADSB receiver at the airfield? Since the majority of users are looking for commercial jets its probably fine.
My only parting comments are that its good to have it back. Its a bit disappointing that it doesn’t see us a bit earlier in the flight and I’m not sure why not, I would have been quite high for quite a while by the first ping, I think its probably how the algorithm decides its an interesting flight maybe?
Adding in the second image that it won’t let me post first time.
