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Comment by notahacker | Hacker News Reader

afaik JetNet hasn't offered a competing service before: their focus is on business jet fleet and transaction related data (I worked for what could loosely be described as a competitor)

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...

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Perhaps enabling them to censor the feed is one of the primary reasons for the acquisition. I can't imagine it was that expensive, considering the likes of whom might take issue with the data being public.

Perhaps, but it would be like buying a newsstand to censor a newspaper.

The data is still freely available and will be distributed via another channel.

But will it really become available again? Or, more likely, like RSS, will this snuff it out.

It's amazing how someone with a bit of capital and time can control almost anything that offends them.

That sort of irrational behavior makes me wonder if das muskrat has his paws in this. If he was willing to drop $44 billion on Twitter, this is pocket change by comparison. And he's been desperately trying to get that guy to stop tracking his jet.

  The data is still freely available and will be distributed via another channel.

The ADS-B transmissions are still freely available but the value is in the aggregate product. In the case of ADS-B Exchange that aggregate takes a ton of work from volunteers who (if the comments here are any indication) are inclined to stop volunteering. An ADS-B receiver has a range of dozens, maybe hundreds of miles. Without that network of volunteers Joe Schmo in Santa Cruz will have no way of tuning in to that freely observable transponder in Austin.

There’s most definitely a coordination problem to be solve to recreate that network, and I don’t mean to understate the difficulty of that at all, but I’m wondering if a (reconstituted) network of a small-ish number of volunteers could scale up to, say, 80% of the current ADSB Exchange coverage surprisingly quickly?

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?

It's not impossible or even infeasible really, but it is unlikely and it is a lot of effort. How many open source software projects even have 100 people working on them full time?

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.

I agree that 20M isn't much for Musk but I really doubt he'd hide his involvement behind another company like this.. It's not his style, he'd trumpet it all over Twitter and claim it as a win for free speech or something :P

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.

The information is already publicly broadcast; nobody's paying one particular feed company big bucks to remove it from their records when most others do it simply because they ask nicely or because they don't want to upset the government. And even without the feeds, if a guy with a device somewhere near an airport decides to tweet that Elon has landed, everybody knows anyway.

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