Just some updates on my attempt to share the list of tracked planes on flightradar24.com. In the earlier post 'Ttracking Your Very First Planes' I indicated that I was not successful in doing so. The output from the ADSB receiver was processed by ADSB#. Despite pointing ADSB# and fr24feed (flightradar24.com's feeder software), fr24feed still reports the '"Too few aircraft, at least 2 required" error, despite seeing like 5 aircrafts being tracking in adsbscope. What was interesting then was that fr24feed indicated that the basestation was 'OK'. Normally if there is any configuration problem, fr24feed will spit out a big fat 'ERROR' message at the 'Basestation' entry.

I looked up more on this issue and found the cause, I think. The data format output by ADSB# is simply just incompatible with what fr24feed requires. Here is a screen shot of the dump from ADSB# on port 47806 -

It turns out the 'correct' software I should use is rtl1090 which was superseded by dump1090, so I went with that. dump1090 can be downloaded from - http://www.satsignal.eu/software/dump1090-win.1.08.2705.14.zip

A good guide for setting this up can be found at - http://planeplotter.pbworks.com/w/page/79995023/Dump1090

Since my ADSB receiver driver is working and I did not install rtl1090 previously, I only need to unzip the downloaded folder and run 'dump1090.bat'. You should see something like this -

The screen shot of the dump from dump1090 on port 30002 is completely different -

I then went through the routine of entering my email and approximate GPS coordinates and started fr24feed. It again return with a 'Basestation:OK' and 'Too few aircraft, at least 2 required ' status. First I have to say I am testing all these in my office. Soon I realized that my antenna is lying horizontally on a sofa below the window ledge level -

Of course in doing so the signal is in the wrong polarization with respect to the antenna. The antenna probably cannot see any portion of the sky when placed below the window ledge. I took the antenna up and held it in my hand. The number of tracked planes short up to 5 and fr24feed managed to generate a sharing key and off I go (fr24feed at lower right corner) -

The dump1090 software also has a web based output accessible by browsing the local ip address on port 8080 (shown above).

After that to obtain the premium membership (non of those timeout nonsense) on flightradar24, I just created an account with the same email and click the 'I am feeding data' option.

I noticed that not all the planes that was tracked by my receiver are visible on the flighradar24.com website. Conversely when I put down the antenna (no I was not holding the antenna up all the time when I was doing this) so that no planes were tracked on my receiver, non of those tracks on flightradar24.com are dropped. Maybe their server requires the same track from a number of feeds before it accepts it as a genuine track? This means a lone platform with a single receiver in the ocean may not work. Will check more on this. Meanwhile onwards with the sharing.

Another interesting thing I found while scanning around on flightradar24 map is this -

The two balloons on the map turns out to be balloons launched by Google for project loon - http://www.google.com/loon/. It is a project by Google to essentially strap wifi repeaters (or something like it) on balloons and with a large fleet of these balloons, try to bring internet to every corner of the earth (hemmm...).

What is interesting is that the balloons forms a ring around some latitude of the earth in the southern hemisphere which is determined by the jet streams in the stratosphere. These jet stream crosses the oceans. Could this be part of the solution to the communication problem with the Global Seer platforms in the ocean? Cliffhanger here I guess.