Did their acquisition price factor in the % of people who will stop feeding because of this? It's one thing to feed a free open source project it's another to give free labor to Silversmith Capital.
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.
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.
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.
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.
(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?
I run a receiver that feeds into both networks, and in both cases I look at it as a value-for-value exchange.
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.
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.
It's amazing how someone with a bit of capital and time can control almost anything that offends them.