AirNav Product Comparisons

[jgomberg]

I have recently acquired the following AirNav products but do not "fully" understand their differences and application. The products I now own are as follows:

RadarBox with v2.0 2009 software
Live Flight Tracker 6.3
AirNav Suite 4

I live near Chattanooga, TN and am not currently seeing much live traffic at my home location due to propagation issues and lack of ADS-B use here locally.

I understand that AirNav LFT6 is a network only product versus RadarBox which appears to incorporate both local 'realtime' input from the receiver (when there is input to be received) as well as delayed networked traffic.

What I don't fully understand is why, if both RadarBox and LFT6 utilize network traffic, I see significantly more local and regional activity over the same geography on LFT6 than I do on RadarBox?

I was hoping I could one-stop-shop with RadarBox, but for the moment I am running both RB and LFT6 at the same time.

Further, other than the inclusion of the ACARS and SELCAL decoders does AirNav Suit 4 serve any useful purpose that cannot be found in either RadarBox or LFT?

AirNav's website - product section fails to provide sufficient information to help me fully differentiate the products. Perhaps I missed something somewhere.

The other confusing thing is that I can see european activity but limited US activity with RadarBox and see US activity and no european activity with LFT6. You would think that there would be one product that consolidates it all. Again, maybe I've got something misconfigured.

It also appears that none of the products display asian, south american, african, or scandinavian activity over their respective geographies. Is this normal or am I doing something wrong?

BTW, I have all filtering turned off in all programs except that I have both general aviation and commercial aviation turned on. These are also new, clean installations.

Any clarifications would be sincerely appreciated.

Thank you

[Murnango]

While he is waiting for a tech answer, i am on RB 2007 and i only have it a month, how do i upgrade?

[Allocator]

While he is waiting for a tech answer, i am on RB 2007 and i only have it a month, how do i upgrade?

Download the full version of RB 2009 from here:

http://www.airnavsystems.com/RadarBox/support.html

This will install a completely new version of RB.  Don't bother with the Upgrade version, as some users have had problems with this. You don't need to uninstall RB2007. 

[AirNav Support]

Here is quick summary:

RadarBox - Shows ADS-B aircraft received by RadarBoxes across the world
Live Flight Tracker 6.3 US Version - Shows FAA ADSI flights in the US
Live Flight Tracker 6.3 EU Version - Shows ADS-B aircraft received by RadarBoxes in Europe.
AirNav Suite 4 - A interface for Selcal and ACARS.

If you any further questions about products which is not RadarBox please contact support direct.

[nortonbeak]

Here you will find some explanation about ACARS. This will operate with AirNav Suite 4.

http://www.acarsonline.co.uk/about/

You will also need an ACARS decoder before you can use AirNav Suite 4. There are some free ones if you search the 'net as well as AirNav Decoder which requires a subscription.

[prbflight]

I use Airnav Suite as an interface with RadarBox.  To do this you will also need Planeplotter.  AirNav Suite has a great All Heard Management tool that shows contacts that you have picked up on radio, observed or captured by ACARS (in case of interface with RadarBox, ADS-B as well).  I have requested AirNav Developers to incorporate a 'Heard' 'ACARS' and 'Visual' input option in RadarBox but it doesn't seem to get much support.  Maybe other's should contact AirNav Dev Team about this if this is something you would like to see in a future release.  This would make RadarBox a total all rouund package.  Wouldn't it be great to watch the network and see at a glance aircraft that you have captured locally by a visual, radio, ACARS or by ADB-S?  To be able to look at MyLog and see all this info would make for a complete planespotting record.  How about it?  Any other's interested in this feature?   

Paul@cyyb

[jgomberg]

First of all, I appreciate Support's prompt response. Thank you for the clarification.

How about it?  Any other's interested in this feature?

As I understand it, AirNav has four applications each of which specialize in displaying one or more of four different data streams: Live ADS-B, Networked EU ADS-B (delayed), FAA ADSI (delayed), SELCAL/ACARS (live and/or delayed).

Splitting the data streams across 4 applications seems (to me) a disjointed marketing approach, though I speculate that the history of implementation of AirNav's network and technologies has much to do with the evolution of separate products.

If I were standing in an ATC center looking at an operations console, I would expect to see (more or less) every plane in the air within the viewing window of the radar envelope.

Consequently I would like to see a single RadarBox application that emulates this experience as closely as possible and I wouldn't mind paying a premium for this integrated capability. Charge me, if you wish, for enabling different modules/data-streams, but give me a common integrated interface from which to do so.

Having read much of the forums, I understand the issues relating to live versus delayed data. I think the trick would be how effectively AirNav's software development would integrate the various data streams with their various delays into a single integrated customer experience. I don't believe the effort would either be wasted or that complex.

Personally I would give the client the option of turning all or individual data streams on and off as well as provide a mechanism for synching all enabled streams to one common timing delay (or just let the streams display raw/unsynched and let the user sort it out his or her own preference.)

There are a lot of good reasons for doing this from the client side aside from an integrate and enriching virtual ATC experience. For one, an integrated interface would significantly reduce the video paging, cpu and memory allocation overheads associated with four concurrently operating applications.

From a business model point of view, application pricing could be tiered based on the number of modules or streams the user wishes to enable, plus the "upgrade" to an integrated application would contribute added revenues.

Taking the concept one step further, how interesting would it be to button in ShipTracks as an additional module? Just because I am a pilot enthusiast doesn't mean that I don't have an interest monitoring the movements of various cargo vessels bringing in or delivering vendor/client cargo. Then again it's probably 'cooler' to split and display air and water apps between separate PC's or monitors.

Like Prbflight, I think it would be interesting to see how many others feel the same way.

Thanks for listening.

[Deadcalm]

Very interesting.  I'd also like to see a more integrated suite.  However, my personal observations would indicate that a). The majority of RadarBox users would appear to be hobbyists, and therefore would not be in a position to either make full use of or afford the additional functionality, and b). without wishing to appear too critical, I think there is quite a bit of work to do on RadarBox in its present incarnation to render it more robust across the scope of current users, before adding more functionality or bells and whistles.

I'm not sure whether it was ever intended to be a pro/semi-pro bit of kit.

DC

[AirNav Support]

Sounds like a custom soultion that we do for our Proffesional customers.

The data streams are though different, example is Live Flight Tracker Europe allows you to view US and Europe Flights. The US flights have all the information from FAA but does not have registration of aircraft. The EU flights use the RadarBox network which does not track all flights and also will have limited information regarding routes and flight plans.

We would love to create an application which gives an all round view or the world from our sources with everything registrations, flight plans, Keep posted to our site :)

[AirNav Development]

>I'd also like to see a more integrated suite.

You will have good news later this year.

Regarding the professional versions: although being developed specially for the hobbyists RadarBox has now several (more than 20) airlines using it. Also more than 50 airports / airport authorities. Anyway we are preparing a professional suite that will include all possible data sources in a single application.

[jgomberg]

Anyway we are preparing a professional suite that will include all possible data sources in a single application.

I think that is great! I hope that your single user pricing model will be fair to the enthusiast.

It's refreshing to see both Support and Development having a presence in the user forums and openly willing to consider customer feedback.

Keep up the good work.