From the Flight Deck: FlightAware Blog

ADS-B Network News: November 2024

Written by FlightAware ADS-B | November 14, 2024 6:00:34 PM Z

See the latest from the FlightAware ADS-B Network, a community of aviation enthusiasts hosting a network of over 34,000 receivers in almost 200 countries and on all seven continents. If you're interested in joining or adding to our network, you can learn more about hosting a receiver here, or use the link below to check out our PiAware kits, which make it easy to get started.

 

Hello FlightAware ADS-B Network!

Welcome to the November edition of FlightAware’s ADS-B Newsletter. Here are the highlights this month:

  • Mark your Calendars for Black Friday!

  • ADS-B Receiver Reliability

  • Featured Host of the Month

  • Did you know…


Mark your calendars for Black Friday!

ADS-B Receiver Reliability

In the tech world, reliability is defined by how consistently online and functional a system is over time. At FlightAware, we maintain reliable data centers that support your receivers and keep our products and services running seamlessly.

Because our ADS-B Network relies on crowd-sourced data, each receiver, including yours, is an essential part of our overall reliability. We’ve found that due to the nature of the network, receivers are constantly going offline, rebooting, or experiencing performance issues. This can be due to wide range of factors: weather, unstable Internet connectivity on home and office networks, an antenna got knocked down on the floor… you name it. This can impact our collective ability to deliver accurate flight tracking. By keeping your receiver up and running, you’re helping us build a reliable flight tracking network for everyone.

If you’re new to the network or haven’t seen it yet, read one of our blog posts on how to optimize your ADS-B receiver for reliability and performance.

Featured Host of the Month

This month we’re featuring heiligenwho, who has been contributing to FlightAware since 2016. He appreciates the very cool engineered setups that we’ve featured recently, but he wanted to showcase how a simple very reliable setup can be done for the average contributor. His PiAware has been online with a continuous streak of 3 years and counting!

 

 

The simple configuration starts with a 1090MHz FlightAware ADS-B Antenna - 66cm / 26in, 1M RF Type-N Male to SMA Male Antenna Extension Coaxial Cable, FlightAware old school dongle, and Raspberry Pi 3 B+ Motherboard with 3.5 Inch HDMI LCD Mini Display. As mentioned last month, using outdoor antennas inside can perform pretty well and here’s another example of this. Check out his My ADS-B Statistics dashboard to see his receiver performance.

💡 Did you know... 💡 

You can build an ADS-B antenna out of some copper or a tin can?

Check out this popular post on our discussion forums showing how you can build a DIY antenna. Three Easy DIY Antennas for Beginners Perfect for a weekend project!

Would you like to be featured in our monthly newsletter?

Share your photos and a short story with us by uploading them to our ADS-B Photo Upload Form. We’ll pick out a few of the best ones to feature each month to share with the FlightAware community. We also welcome any topics you’re interested in reading about in our newsletter.

Help increase our coverage!

Our ADS-B network spans across 194 countries on all 7 continents thanks to you all. Our goal is to expand our terrestrial ADS-B coverage across the entire world, especially around airports to improve our surface coverage. If you or someone you know has connections to airports and FBO’s or live in areas where we lack coverage, we’d love to send you a FlightFeeder! You can apply for one here. If we already have coverage in your area, you can still contribute to FlightAware by building your own PiAware. It’s a fun little weekend project!


STAY IN TOUCH

Click the link below to visit the ADS-B Flight Tracking discussion forum on our website, or follow us on social media to stay up to date with the latest news!