Jetnet Acquires ADS-B Exchange, a community-fed ADSB aggregator
jetnet.com
jetnet.com
The data has some value in supporting that core product (as an additional data feed to sell a handful of enterprise clients, to support their fleet data research and possibly to enhance their FBO/charter products). I guess part of the appeal of ADS-B Exchange is that working in business aviation, an unfiltered dataset is a lot more useful to them than a filtered one like most of the commercial providers.
Still seems like a slightly odd acquisition, since they could have got the data beforehand relatively inexpensively and they'd probably get better feed coverage leaving it as an OS project and I do wonder how they'll manage privacy requests from some of their clients...
The data is still freely available and will be distributed via another channel.
It's amazing how someone with a bit of capital and time can control almost anything that offends them.
The data is still freely available and will be distributed via another channel.
My feeder, which cost maybe $100 all-in (pi + sdr + antenna; though the pi was much cheaper then than it is now) has full coverage of two major airports. Normal range is 200 miles (obviously dependent on altitude) and sometimes picks up plans ~250 miles away, I assume depending on relatively rare atmospheric conditions.
With reasonably optimal distribution of what, a few hundred receivers, my mental math is suggesting you could cover a majority of the continental U.S. landmass and a large majority of its population and air traffic?
Again, not to understand the magnitude of this. But if someone’s objective is generally to redistribute public data, or track Gulfstreams on their way to Omaha during times of financial upheaval, or poke a finger in the eye of the private jet lobby, but not to create a 99% comprehensive, monetizable data source for a sale to private equity - maybe it’s not crazy infeasible?
I hope something fills the shoes left by ADS-B Exchange, but I won't hold my breath. I already had the Pi so I probably spent around $40 getting the SDR + cheapo antenna. I got bored with it quickly though as there's already decent coverage of the Bay Area – and the SDR has since been repurposed to monitor my fridge.
Considering the new owner is a jet charter they do probably have a similar motive, I just don't think Elon is behind it here.
I just turned off my sharing and looking for alternatives. If anyone know of any, please share them :)
"The OpenSky Network is a non-profit community-based receiver network which has been continuously collecting air traffic surveillance data since 2013. Unlike other networks, OpenSky keeps the complete unfiltered raw data and makes it accessible to academic and institutional researchers."
For what it is worth, I don't actually know what the PE company bought. I guess the historical data and a rack full of servers - but the staff, community, and service are moving elsewhere.
Instead of everybody uploading their data to one dude who can sell out, instead flood-fill it. We're not talking about a lot of data here.
It is actually a massive amount of data. Gigabits per second that need to be aggregated, sorted by geographic region, fed into multilateration systems, and cleaning the output before it can be shown on a map.
Here it feels more like people are providing unpaid work (by running receivers) and who in their right mind would continue doing that for a commercial entity.
Most people with a smartphone. I do enjoy more precise GPS even if it means Apple and Google are soaking up Wi-fi hotspot info to improve triangulation. I think the difference is most people don't realize they're feeding this info to companies.
I run a receiver that feeds into both networks, and in both cases I look at it as a value-for-value exchange.
(I totally get the fun aspect and it's fairly cheap to put a receiver up.)
Flightaware (and FR24) censors (for a fee).
I remember emailing a journo covering a protest to look up and observe the plane circling around.
But ultimately they’re different services: Adsb is vessel focussed, while FA/FR24 are flight# focussed.
Want to find out what routes your aircraft typically flies? Adsb will be the place to check.
Want to see if your flight is typically on-time? FA/FR24.
Are there any services you're aware of that don't censor?
EDIT: In their FAQ it currently states: "In very limited situations ADSBexchange.com may choose to allow non-profit, research, or educational entities access to the historical data or API at reduced fee, in these situations such entities must meet all other requirements including hosting a feeder. ADSBexchange.com API pricing is a fraction of the cost of ADS-B data available anywhere else." To me that is quite different than their previous policy of providing automatic noncommercial API access to anyone hosting a feeder. It removes an incentive to feed and discourages use of the API.
https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-private-jet-no-lon...
In some cases, having several thousands of geographically distributed volunteers submitting open source data can result in a more accurate picture than what a handful of government funded agencies could provide.
In the case of tracking things like Epstein's jet does that really make a difference? The flights are going to start and end at airports, which I would guess would have ADS-B monitors.
The thousands of RTL-SDRs could be good for find the particular route taken between airports but that's usually not going to be relevant for an investigation, except for crimes that take place in the air.
Something like that.
I would really like to know the story behind this acquisition as my previous interactions with the ADS-B Exchange owner (edit: after checking back in on the discord maybe this person was not the owner, but one of the main team members) on discord were positive and they seemed like a very passionate and principled person. This was like more than 1 year ago now, though. My suspicion is that the loud, polarized public discourse around the ElonJet controversy, which led to ADS-B Exchange getting banned from Twitter, may have caused them to reassess their priorities. I hope they are not under any kind of legal threat from Musk.
> Airframes is an aircraft-related aggregation service that receives ACARS, VDL, HFDL, and SATCOM data from volunteers around the world.
> It is under very active development and you will notice changes from day to day. Also, issues are expected.
> Contributing your feed allows us to make ground developing new decoders and make important statistical observations. It also benefits users of the service so that they can see more about flights as they traverse covered territories.
Perhaps the original founders' work will continue here?
EDIT: It does not seem like the original founders has collaborated with the community on this, and the people there are just as lost as anyone else.
It's kind of chaos currently. I only joined this Discord in December and it was very different then. It seemed to be pretty community oriented, with images for RaspPi and scripts to help setup feeding and the developers of these tools were in there chatting. Not company employed people to my knowledge.
This feels a lot more skeezy. Oh well, fool me once, and all that. I do look forward to shutting down my feed once I’m back in front of a computer.
Something something, why we can’t have nice things.
Too bad that every TOS out there basically boils down to “we own your data to the maximum extent that doesn’t create any liability for us (but if it does, you’ll indemnify us) and we can change these terms at any time.” Makes it hard to do a proper assessment of what exactly you’re stepping into.
When I questioned him about it he got very defensive and started resorting to personal attacks. By the end the the discussion he had deleted all of the pertaining chat messages from Discord, which I found childish. If you read past logs of his conversations, he's notorious for acting like that with people asking legitimate questions.
In my opinion, that's the exact opposite type of person that you want running this sort of thing that is essentially propped up by the community. It's a skeevy model today because they actually profit off of what the community provides. Ideally, this would all be open sourced and run by some governance board just like any successful open sourced venture.
ADSBx are still far worse, since they built the site as an "open community".
That “open” database got sold off and became Gracenote [1].
I’m not sure how many times we need to learn this lesson.
I know people have made attempts to solve this, like B Corps and groups like the Apache Foundation. But I don't think we're there yet. One could try to create a foundation that specifically incubates projects that go beyond open source to open/collective services. But even if one solves funding for that, there's still the problem of finding the naive starters of things and crushing their dreams just enough to get them on a better course, but not so much that they quit.
England (where I live) had a lot of Building Societies - mutual institutions where some members are saving money, and those savings are lent to other members (borrowers) to buy homes to live in, the interest from which of course makes this a good deal for the savers done at scale (so as to smooth out inevitable losses when some borrowers default). This can be a very lucrative line of business during a housing boom, and many of these societies found themselves with a considerable cash positive position in the 1980s. Since the members own the society, they can just change the rules of the society and "demutualize", extracting the cash for themselves. Of course this destroys the society, an important institution which has helped so many people to own somewhere to live - but hey, you've got some money and isn't that what's really important?
My parents voted "Yes" to demutualize the society where they'd saved money and from which they had borrowed to buy the house I grew up in, I (as an idealistic teenager who had my own modest savings) voted "No", the "Yes" votes won and the resulting entity, now a bank, eventually was mired in scandal and no longer serves the purpose the proud building society had served before. But hey, they got their money. People like them were nicknamed "Carpetbaggers" in the UK as a result, by analogy to the US concept.
Now, I mention this because as several larger societies were demutualised this way, the remainder realised that the same fate could be theirs, and many swallowed a "poison pill" to prevent it. They changed their rules so that all future members (savers, borrowers, whichever) signed away rights to the proceeds of any demutualisation (e.g. giving it to a charity). So you could vote to tear the society to pieces, but you would no longer make a penny from doing so, and suddenly that's not very attractive.
It worked.
Although my politics aren’t theirs, I don’t hate the Reagan and Thatcher types. I don’t think they were bad people per se (or at least not any worse than anyone else who is capable of ascending to the apex of political power). But I do think they changed some things in their respective cultures for the worse, and those are things that we’re still grappling with today.
Prior to the 1970s investment banks couldn't be listed on the NYSE. Goldman Sachs (etc) weren't corporations. They were partnerships, basically like a law firm. This is a key difference because a partnership has unlimited liability. This tends to make such organizations very conservative with risk management, for obvious reasons.
But when this changed, all these partnerships incorporated instead and listed on the stock exchange. Incorporation shields the leaddership from the downside of their bad decisions. As we've seen, the governmen thas stepped in to assume that risk for really no good reason at all ("too big to fail").
Interestingly, I'm not sure there's a legal barrier preventing law firms from listing on the stock exchange but they don't, which is interesting.
So in your case these mutual societies and community banks existed for the benefit of their members and they (including the members) took the (one time) bag and was shielded from accountability. I see investment banks as falling into this same trap.
Most law firms in the United States are now organized as LLPs (a limited liability partnership, which segregates liability among the partners), but notably the most profitable law firm measured in a per capita basis, Wachtell, is still organized as a general partnership with unlimited partner liability. They deliver their clients one-line invoices, containing numbers with many, many more zeroes, for “services rendered.”
There's room for another provider, and at the same time lots of enthusiasts with the boxes will carry on sending it, like they do to other closed source, profit-making ventures like FlightAware and Flightradar24...
I would absolutely not go to airframes.io in it's current state.
Also this from SoylentADSB:
> CEO of JETNET ( Greg Fell, now fired from JETNET by Silversmith) called and asked for a meeting. We thought was sales call. Turns out he offered to buy ADSBx from Dan for $8M, they wined dined and toured him around. Flew him to Boston, Dan cut us out when we ALL OBJECTED to a sale. We think they gave him $20M ish and a $200 a year job at JETNET. They'll fire him in a year, that's what PE does.
£20M for the name in the knowledge that the software isn't secret, the infrastructure isn't that complicated and that the community will rebrand and be back up with a couple of months of disruption (ala freenode->liberachat) seems like guilt free retirement money in the bank. You could even make an anonymous donation to whoever takes the place.
The value comes from the current data, and the data is reliant on the community which is something you can't purchase. Most people liked ADSBx because it supported MLAT and was happy to report aircraft that from that data that usually wouldn't show on pf, fr24 and most others. If that functionality is removed then the community would likely die away naturally anyway.
Because if the historical data isn't all that valuable, I feel like Jetnet bought a turd. Building and operating a service like ADS-B Exchange doesn't sound particularly technically challenging or expensive.
Building a community of people who send you data for free is the hard and time-consuming part; IMO that's where ADSBx's value is. Did Jetnet not anticipate that the acquisition would likely drive away a good number of those people? Seems pretty naive if they didn't.
One of the technical leads on the project said the site was generating between $500-3000 a day in revenue. It wasn’t clear if that was just ad revenue (which is a cash flow PE is definitely NOT buying) or ads + data subscriptions, but I just can’t imagine they bought much of substance here, when it sounds like the entire technical team has moved on. If the feeder network declines, what’s left? Stale flight data?
Super weird investment.
I'd feel bad about it, definitely, as I do agree it'd be a slap in the face to the community, and I'd know that I'd probably never get people to trust me in the role of running that sort of a service again. Not to mention burning bridges with the community members who helped run the service.
But $20M? I'm lucky that I've already built up a nice nest egg through the whole FIRE thing, but $20M (even after taxes) would take me from "can live a pretty comfortable life without working as long as I watch my finances" to "can live an amazing life without working, and will never have to worry about money ever again".
I'm not sure what terms ADS-B Exchange licensed out the collected data, but maybe it's even possible for someone to build a new service, and keep the historical data intact. Even if not, it seems like there is at least one other community-run service for people who are upset by this to switch to. And frankly this doesn't seem like a particularly difficult or expensive service to build or maintain.
Is it normal for a company like that to more than double their initial offer? I know 20m is probably pocket change to them, but it still seems like they were rather desperate to buy it.
1) What will participants get out of it?
2) How will you pay for the central services used?
3) Where there isn't enough volunteer labor, how will you pay for needed labor?
I don't want to discourage anybody, but there are some hard sustainability problems there.
(FWIW I'm happy to chat: have sold non-ADSB aviation data and consulting before and been involved with buying ADSB and AIS from a commercial provider)
Do you have a sense of where some good dividing lines are between what to give to the general public, what contributors get, and what is marketable?
As an example, AISHub data contributors get a free real-time stream of global data in the same format that comes out of an AIS receiver. They also get limited API access: https://www.aishub.net/api
On top of that, the company that runs AISHub sells both software and data services: http://www.astrapaging.com/data-services
Potentially a lot of the value comes from providing specific cuts of the data for specific purposes to companies (statistics on aircraft hours and cycles for companies supplying parts and maintenance, trend analysis). There are of course already authoritative sources that specialise in that, but they're relatively expensive, and a lot of the commercial customers want Excel files with prepared data tables for their commercial use, not API access to a stream that probably needs some cleaning up. Selling that value add stuff is compatible with making the core data streams open. The rest obviously comes from API access (which you'd likely want to limit to some extent so consumer web and mobile apps aren't hammering them for data)
Marketability is going to depend a huge amount on whether it's possible to get enough people on board to get good coverage, bearing in mind there are plenty of ADS-B data aggregation services out there (and they tend to have historical data going back several years, with the more commercially oriented ones having sales teams and full service customer support)
1. The same they got out of ADS-B Exchange: open aviation data. I would work with the Internet Archive to archive batches of the data stream on a cadence. We should never be able to take historical data away. It is yours, forever.
2. I would pay for a dedicated server out of my pocket to bootstrap, with the eventual goal of accumulating enough donations to have a very small non profit investment account that would throw off just enough returns to pay for the server(s) or a rack of equipment at a colo indefinitely (I’m partial to Hurricane Electric but any reasonable priced vendor will do). Again, strong governance around this as a US non profit to demonstrate transparency and efficiency. I would also accept equipment, colo, and bandwidth donations from folks who could ensure consistency, quality, and continuity of the resource.
3. We would rely primarily on volunteers, similar to OpenStreetMap, who runs lean fiscally speaking [1]. The Internet Archive runs their servers for 5-7 years (per u/jonah-archive's ops talk), so I would shoot for a long bare metal depreciation schedule, a time series database stored in Backblaze B2, high level just an efficient use of capital for the technology components. I suppose I'm going back into an on call rotation. C'est la vie. Automate All The Things.
Poke holes in my thoughts, that's how they improve. I would also be interested in expanding into the AIS space; it's all UDP packets from SDRs coming into a software router and logger (with a visualization and admin frontend).
I'd be interested to see if the Internet Archive wants large globs of this kind of data. I actually have something like 5 years of AIS data that I've been collecting and I'd be happy to contribute it.
I totally agree with you on transparency and efficiency.
Taking donations is a chancy model. People get excited up front, but ongoing expenses requires ongoing begging unless you get really lucky with the amount of money raised up front. And even then, as Wikipedia shows, people tend to get ideas about using the money to do more stuff. As someone else suggested, a revenue-driven model might be more sustainable.
The co-op I helped run was Bandwagon. We rented a cabinet and then shared it out among a bunch of sysadmins who wanted their own boxes on the internet. This started circa 2001, when single-box hosting was rare and virtual hosting was nonexistent. We wound it up a few years ago as most of the people moved to the cloud.
My experience is that people's motivations change over time, and so actually owning hardware is risky if you want to avoid the one-person-in-Nebraska problem. [1]
Charles@turnsys.com for anyone who is serious about this.
My commercial interest is a free software / hardware (with itar exception) high altitude balloon startup that I’m the CTO/founder of .
That said, I can also think of a few ways you might be able to structure a successor that can’t exit like this, without having to deal with the headache of qualification and compliance as a non-profit. Interesting thought exercise.
Companies eat things to kill them because it works. Only some fraction of users will jump to the alternative, and indeed the alternative never ends up as strong as the original.
Are there examples of where the alternative turned out stronger?
Interesting to see if a certain someone's jet(s) remain trackable
> You can now feed VHF/voice data to OpenSky and help researchers around the world. Check out the interface and set up a feeder at https://ui.atc.opensky-network.org/
their github [1] has a bunch of very nice, modular Docker images that make it easy to feed one or more ADSB aggregators. (by comparison, a lot of the other software ecosystem around amateur SDR / ADSB relies on `curl | sudo bash` type install scripts)
I have a raspi which doesn't do much left. I guess I'll add it to the network soon.
Thank you :)
https://twitter.com/ADSBex/status/1618306706861338625
Hasn't said anything in the forum or the site news section, and hasn't posted that tweet until after the official announce by Jetnet.
Looks like a case of "take the money and run". Doesn't smell good for the ads-b community.
And I'm sure at least one alternative will pop up
Speaking of which, I created my own site[1] within the past couple of years...have a few friends feeding data. I set them up with Pi's, antennas, cords and the proper software. Would be super stoked if anyone else wanted to feed me!
[1]https://radar.airport-frequencies.com
Hit me up if you want to join!
Plus proximity doesn't mean you can see airplanes that are behind buildings, at low altitude, etc.
ZOMG, that's like... a 1990s DSL connection!
Right now every single player in this space is operating illegally, but it'll probably take years before data protection authorities will start to crack down.
Data Protection laws, and I believe the GDPR is the same, aren't interested in just stuff you've got, for example if you write a blog, and you mention that you saw Jim at the weekend and his sister is apparently pregnant, these laws do not consider that you've got a database there with a single row ("Jim's sister" "Pregnant") which needs to be treated as PII and have Subject access requirements etc. You're not really collecting pregnancy status data about women, you just have a blog post.
Whereas if I build a scraper, and I search thousands of blogs and correlate stuff to build a Postgres DB with "Jim's sister" "Pregnant" as one of dozens of rows, that is the sort of thing these laws care about.
So I can imagine that likewise "Here are radio signals I am receiving" looks like public information, no big deal, whereas "Here is a database of records I gathered by studying the past 24 hours of radio signals" is different.
You also can't set up a camera on the side of the road and store peoples registration plates and times when they drove past.
You could also easily track cellphone IMEIs and locations in the same way these services track aircraft, that's not gonna fly either.
Obviously you'll be completely fine if you only store data on commercial aviation, general aviation will pretty much immediately veer into GDPR territory.
> You also can't set up a camera on the side of the road and store peoples registration plates and times when they drove past.
That's just because setting up cameras on public roads isn't allowed as you can capture people as well. Writing down license plates would be fine.