Don't know, maybe I'm missing something but I can't understand why it looks like under a certain latitude there are no mlat feeders at all...I've captured the coverage of mlat zone 3 and 4, the whole Mediterranean area is empty...but the Global Radar View shows traffic, there are lot of receiving stations...no one of them participating in any matrix?
That map pin is not exactly accurate representation of MLAT or feeders. Feeders can hide the pin with the --privacy flag and quite honestly I don't think the MLAT server is all that good at making the maps.
Indeed, I´m feeding 2 feeds from Portugal, and most of the time they don´t show up in map. When it happens, the mlat application show errors like this:
Hi! Any news about this? Still not showing my 2 stations 90% of time I look at coverage map... Thanks for your great work!
I do not know if James can confirm it, but I have the impression of "full is full", and "first come first served". After a restart of my feeder it takes sometimes many hours before I see myself on the sync/coverage list. It seems that someone first has to drop off before a new feeder can be admitted. In my opinion a good reason to keep my feeder working 24/7 without interruption. I see that James is working on that and understand that his day has only 24 hours too.
Yes, I agree with you, me too keep my feeds 24/7 and I understand that time is not enought for everything, and family and payed work comes first . Just trying to hear any news about this problem that affect some 20 or more feeders. Most of time, only UK feeders are show in map, all the others ( French, spanish , portuguese and others...) don't apear. For some people it might be desencouraging to keep feeds up. Not for me, of course, the MLAT feature is so interesting that I will always keep feeding.
The MLAT server is an interesting beast. Basically we need to buy a few more servers and put the UK on it's own MLAT -- maybe even half and half the country. It's a lot of work, mostly to design the routing in HAproxy but reading the json the mlat client connects with initially and sending it to the appropriate mlat server so it can be mlat with other feeders near it. With 2020 coming - it's just low on the priority list. Also the MLAT server is a CPU hog, it's expensive on cpu cycles to calculate the probability matrix. What's interesting is ADSBx uses everyone that's feeding the MLAT server, which is one of the issues. FlightAware and other sites only use a fraction of the feeders, so most of the time people don't know they aren't mlating. The must route the data from the overall MLAT for a feeder. So people only see the green light and they get some data - they don't show it like ADSBx does so nobody is the wiser.
I noticed this too. It's the load of traffic, at a certain point the MLAT server doesn't take anymore feeders, or can't because it's spending cpu cycles on incoming data not managing new connections. Also only feeds with the --privacy setting not set will show, I believe it is default as --privacy for the image. When there is low traffic everything on down populates properly.
