So I had suggested this thread in another forum, and this specific sub-forum was recomended. My question was "why so few 978 hits".
I ended up connecting my dedicated 1090 antenna and started to see some hits, so it appears that it is indeed an issue of not as many users (as some had suggested). I'll make a dedicated 978 ground plane antenna and try it again this weekend.
One suggestion I'd like to see is an online dashboard for receiving stations. I'm curious how well (or bad) my station is doing relative to others....
TLDR; We understand the desire for these things. We've always tried to avoid gimmicks. Dev time is a concern. Cost is a big concern in the short term.
Our thoughts on "leader boards" being in involved in aircraft tracking for almost a decade:
Made up "leader" statistics dashboards are on the list but not a priority at this time. There's no practical use for or way of weighing other feeds versus an individual feed. It's impractical to weigh a feed on a tower versus someone in an attic or a window that just enjoys contributing to Airplanes.Live.
message rate?
range?
number of aircraft?
Location matters!
Everyone's RF and terrain situation is different along with variations in hardware. Rankings are to simply distract feeders from what is going on in the industry. Make sense?
Can we say having a feed in Barstow is worse than a feed in LAX because the message rate will be lower? The amount of aircraft is lower? Maybe the feed is not on a tower. Is that a sensible conclusion?
Why bother to feed in Barstow, it's never going to high ranked, it's never going to have dongle waving numbers high on a leader board. Odd behavior for a company to essentially shame "low performing feeds", especially when we as a community would like to have complete coverage to see airplanes.
This is something I've never understood as a RF nerd, FlightAware really broke this hobby with the goofy leader boards and "flightcrews".
It worked out for Raytheon (FlightAware )because people compete and dump endless amounts of money for incremental gains with diminishing returns for feeders. So maybe there is something to smoke and mirrors?
Also, I'll add that 90% will feed FlightAware, why not just look there? We're not competing with FlightAware. They charge $25K a month or more for a data feed.
Four guys without $100M in revenue could use all our time to make up fake leader boards or we could dedicate our limited time to creating SDR or gear to expand our hobby. Everything has a cost, even the servers to host fake leader boards and deal with the complaints about why feeder X is ranked over feeder Y, when feeder X sent 2 more messages that month and feeder Y has 0.1 miles less range.
Ideally, one needs to have local area stats, say 5 or 15 miles at most. It's complex. Stats are also not furthering and end up a massive black hole for dev time that generates constant complaints about implementation.
The team at Airplanes.Live, like most people, want to track planes, not look at graphs that have nothing to really say. Plus, the feeder images have stats dashboards, share some screenshots in our Discord or anywhere really!
One last note: the MLAT sync map is a decent performance metric, the more feeds you sync with that better your coverage invariably is, because it requires overlapping coverage with other feeds. Now that catch is someone in LAX (dense metro areas) will rank higher on syncs than someone in a very rural area in Kansas globally. But for local area ranking, MLAT overlap. Good stuff.
