Adding your own charts and outlines
As background for your Plane Plotter display, you can use either an image (which you may need to calibrate) or outlines (vectors) which have the advantge of maintaining their quality as you zoom into an area. If you have charts for Ship Plotter, or outlines from BaseStation, you can use those, or other data from the Internet:
How do I enter my home location, and use my own symbols?
You can enter a marker for your home location by using the Options, Home location... menu. You will be presented with a dialog box, where you enter your latitude and longitude. Both values are entered as degreees and decimal minutes, so north 50 degrees, 7 minutes and 30 seconds would be entered as N55 7.500. From Plane Plotter V4.7.9 onwards, you can design your own graphic for your home location. Enter Help, Search, "bitmap" for more details on how to make the bitmap, and name your bitmap "homelocationsymbol.bmp", and place it in the Plane Plotter main directory. You can also define your own symbols for waypoints, track and routes in GPX overlay files should you wish.
What do the different colours mean?
The colour of the icon denotes the data source:
- -1 - ACARS no position (no plot)
- 0 - ACARS position - red
- 1 - ACARS ADS 'next estimated position' report - blue
- 2 - ACARS AMDAR position - green
- 3 - SBS or RB log file data position - yellow (real-time) or orange (delayed)
- 4 - HFDL position - cyan
- 5 - ACARS flight-plan waypoint position - magenta
- 6 - SBS-1 TCP position delayed - yellow or orange
- 7 - RadarBox position delayed - yellow or orange
- 8 - RadarBox Log Access
Notes:
- You can customise the colour of the text (using the Options, Chart, Options menu or spanner toolbar icon) to differentiate between locally-derived data, and that downloaded from the shared server.
- The reports other than SBS1 are not nearly as frequent and you do have to be looking in the right place to see them, but they are displayed with uniquely colored symbols - aeroplane symbols if speed and direction have been reported, triangular symbols if that data is missing.
- Note that orange may no longer indicate delayed reports if SBS1Srt is in use. The TCP interface was the indication of delayed in the past and now may not be.
- According to Bev, types 1 and 2 are not intended to be passed by the COAA PP server since they are predictions, however, it has been discovered type 1 ACARS ADS does pass through the server.
Originally type 3 were all live and therefore in yellow and types 6 and 7 were delayed and therefore orange. In more recent versions, because there are patches and updates that make that generalisation no longer valid, the colour for 3, 6 and 7 types changes from yellow to
orange as the report goes out of date. If you set the "Omit after" time to 5 minutes or more, you will see orange symbols at the limit of your range where the last report from a receding aircraft gradually becomes out of date until it disappears at the "Omit after" time.
How do I distinguish shared aircraft from my local ones?
Use the Options, Chart, Options menu, or the spanner icon on the toolbar. Labels panel ==> Label colours (local / shared). Click on the buttons to change the colours. I have mine set to yellow / cyan.
Why do aircraft disappear or stay too long?
- Why do my plots disappear after 2 minutes? Set Options, Chart, Options, "Omit aircraft after" to a larger value, e.g. 6 minutes.
- Why do my plots seems to stay on my screen long after a plane has landed. Because your "Omit aircraft after" is set to a long value!
How can I display route information?
Plane Plotter does nothing on its own to create routes from Flight Numbers. There are two free add-ons available from the group's Files area (Find Flight and Flight Display, written by Plane Plotter users) which will work alongside Plane Plotter to provide route information as best they can. Use the Options, Chart, Options dialog (spanner symbol) to select what text information to display. If you do not like the route information provided by other users when downloading data, just uncheck the "Accept shared route info" box in the Options, Sharing, Setup dialog.
Why do some aircraft always have an alititude of 33,333 feet?
The altitude 33,333 is a dummy value. Plane Plotter puts it into HFDL reports so that the Google-Earth cockpit view would give a nice view (altitude zero is not a nice view) and it cannot be confused with a real cruising level.
Why does the aircraft symbol change between an aircraft and a triangle?
From the Help information: If a Mode-S report includes speed and heading, the symbol is a directed outline of an aircraft. If no speed and direction are available, a triangular symbol is used. In the case of Mode-S or HFDL messages, if PlanePlotter receives a succession of position reports, it will attempt to calculate the speed and heading from the vector between reports. In this case, the heading and speed may be subject to jitter because the samples may be closely spaced and the positions are quantized.
What are the three numbers on the right-hand side of the status bar?
Bev explains: "At the foot of the display, you will see three numbers, separated by slashes. These numbers are the number of aircraft received in this session, the number of messages received and the number of messages with positions. Note: if you are using PlanePlotter with the SBS1 (with the log file access method) the number of messages will be the same as the number of positions, because every message is a position report."
How can I use flags with Plane Plotter?
PlanePlotter gives you the option to display flags next to any or all of your aircraft. The command to view flags is:
Option>Define>Enable
Once you have Defined where your bsflags.txt file is, select Enable.
You can then select the option to view flags by going to:
VIEW>AIRCRAFT (FLAGGED).
HOWEVER, before you view flags you must:
- Have a folder named BMPFlags in either you PP main folder (or use your SBS-1 BMPFlag folder
- Place a bsflags.txt file in your main PP folder.
Both are available in the PlanePlotter Yahoogroup Files section.
You can have as many bsflags.txt files as you like i.e., military, civil, special. Just Define in PP each time which one you wish to view.
It is as simple as that.
Pat Carty
Locating positionless aircraft
Starting with Plane Plotter V4.9.8, some location data for positionless aircraft can be displayed, by displaying a range ring for the station providing the data. For more information, please see Bev's post to the Plane Plotter Yahoo group.
How it works
The circles feature is intended to help those who want to know where an aircraft that is transmitting its identity and height, but not its position, might be located. It draws a circle around the position of the current sharer who reported the designated aircraft if that sharer's location is known. The radius of the circle is 1.2 times the square root (aircraft height in feet). This is a good approximation for the coverage given a clear antenna close to sea level. If the sharer's antenna is high up then the circle will understate the coverage and if they have a sheltered antenna, it will overstate the coverage. It works pretty well for my traffic, but you can tweak the circle parameters for a better match with a particular sharer's coverage.
If there are several sharers receiving the same aircraft, then the approximate coverage of each of those sharers, for an aircraft at that altitude, is displayed as a circle. It follows that the unknown must be inside all of the circles if it is being recieved by all of those sharers. Provided there are no duplicates in the sharing IDs, the shaded region (whose colour you can change, by the way, if it doesn't match your map colour scheme) shows you the area that falls within all of the circles. The unknown should therefore be in or very close to the shaded region.
The whole thing is not at all exact but it tells you a great deal more than you would have known otherwise (that the aircraft was somewhere in the vicinity of planet Earth).
How to use it
Turn on the option "Circle Sharer" under Options..Chart. Now designate an aircraft. You do that by double clicking on the chart, outline or on the View aircraft list. A dotted circle will appear around the position of the user who received it, if that user's ID is found in the file "sharerlocations.txt" in the application directory. If you received the aircraft yourself, the circle will be centred on the position you have entered as your Home location. The radius of the circle will grow or shrink as the aircraft climbs or descends. If you watch one of your own aircraft descending out of your coverage, you should see that it disappears somewhere around the point where the aircraft crosses the circle (or as the circle crosses the aircraft, as the circle shrinks).
The Database fields
The range ring information is stored in the Plane Plotter Sharer's Database, and Bev kindly provided these notes about the two fields used. In both cases, the decimal separator is a point. Those who, like Bev, live in a country where the conventional decimal separator is a comma, will no doubt be adept at switching between the two.
Max Range
The Max range is in nautical miles which is the ICAO default standard unit for measuring distances longer than runways and visibilities. It should be set to the best range you get (under unremarkable propagation conditions) in directions where there are no obstructions and the aircraft is high enough to be clear of the horizon. I suggested a default of 150 nm. It might be more or less depending on your receiver sensitivity, feeder cable losses and antenna gain.
Range Scale Factor
The Range Scale Factor is the parameter to replace the figure of 1.2 in the 'industry standard' horizon equation (1.2 times the square root of the height in feet giving an answer in nautical miles). If your antenna is clear of obstructions in a flat area close to sea level, this is will be an adequate model. If your antenna is in a prominent place high on a hill, then the figure would be more than 1.2. If you are sunk in a valley, surrounded by hills, then it would be much less. You can work out a sensible value by watching low level aircraft going out of sight. High level aircraft may be lost by the inverse square law but low level ones will disappear behind your horizon. If you use a value of 1.2 for your entry, and you consitently find that on designating one of your own aircraft that is descending out of sight, it is still inside the ring when you lose contact, then reduce the 1.2 to 1.1 or 1.0. This will scale the size of the ring for low level aircraft. High level aircraft will always show a ring of the radius of the Max Range parameter.
Comments (0)
You don't have permission to comment on this page.