For almost a year I’ve been feeding ADS-B traffic to FlightRadar24, installing a tuned antenna on the roof and productionizing my Raspberry PI setup. In addition to FlightRadar24, I also feed to FlightAware and Airplanes.live.
Following your personal stats and seeing your username move up the leaderboard is addictive, especially early on, though now it’s a more casual thing. A casual glance last week showed something unexpected.
FlightRadar24’s generates a representation (polar plot) of how many planes your feeder received, by direction and distance. The left polar plot is July 19, a typical day: maximum range of 239 nautical miles received from the southeast. My typical maximum range is between 215nm to 245nm, always from the southeast, with an occasional max greater than 250nm.
The right polar plot is July 14, a very atypical 300nm max range! O’Hare is located in that general direction and distance, so perhaps I received ADS-B traffic from a plane taking off or landing from O’Hare. Due to a heat dome, the upper midwest experienced a run of hot/humid days, perhaps the weather conditions assisted signal propagation. Regardless, 300nm is 13% farther than anything else I’ve seen.
Whatever the explanation, my FlightRadar24 global ranking has reached its all-time high!
