Squawkbox

[Tailwinds]

What am I doing wrong please?

In my SquawkBox, I have set up four Squawk codes...7500, 7600, 7700, and 0260-0267 with the word "Flash" next to each one in the "Filters & Alerts". The "Active" box in the Alerts section is checked. The Filters box is also checked with the same four codes.
However, I see on occasion that the Squawkbox which is now filtered for just these four codes does indeed flash but I don't know which code it is because the actual code doesn't appear in the box. The only thing that does Flash is the Squawkbox title bar where it says...."SquawkBox - Connected - Filtered". Is it anything to do with the the code 0260-0267 that I've entered wrongly perhaps.

Thanks.

[Andy Frost]

Tailwinds, I can't see anything you've done wrong. If I understand you correctly then you have got the following setup on the Filters & Alerts dialog box.

Filters (Active checkbox ticked)
7500 Shown
7600 Shown
7700 Shown
0260-0267 Shown

Alerts (Active checkbox ticked)
7500 Flash
7600 Flash
7700 Flash
0260-0267 Flash

I tried this setup but with a different code range in place of your 0260-0267 (I used 0660-0670) and I got both a flashing alert and saw the flight with the filtering squawk code in the scrolling window. This also worked when I restarted SquawkBox and waited for it to detect the flights again (in my case EZY6884 Squawking 0661). I will investigate this further however. In the meantime, if you open the SquawkBox menu and go to Filters & Alerts, you should be able to figure out which flight it is by temporarily unchecking the tick from the filters checkbox.

/Andy

P.S. Does anyone know what the emergency was (e.g. listening in on a scanner) for flight BAW188 (G-YMMO) KEWR-EGLL (Newark-London Heathrow) a B772 at around 9:45am UK time this morning which was squawking 7700 on approach to Heathrow? (I saw it land safely).

[Andy Frost]

Just another thought on your problem Tailwinds. What could have happened here is that one of your selected squawk codes was output on port 30003 just for a very short time because that flight came into range and then went out of range. That would cause the SquawkBox alert to trigger and the filtered code would scroll past just once or twice say and then never again (because the scrolling window only shows flights that RadarBox is currently outputing). I think the solution to this is for me to add something like "Alert triggered by code: xxxx" to the title bar when an alert is triggered (with maybe flight number too).

[Tailwinds]

Andy, as always, thanks for your quick replies with help and advice. Here is a screenshot of my SquawkBox setup. I read your above (2nd) post. It would be very much appreciated if you could do something like that for users.

Thanks.

Graham.

[Andy Frost]

To make it clearer which filters are active and which particular flight triggered an alert I have updated SquawkBox. Any filters that are configured are now displayed in full in the title bar, e.g. "SquawkBox - Connected - Filter(Show:7500,7600,7700,4000-4600)" instead of just showing "SquawkBox - Connected - Filtered" as before.

When an alert is triggered the squawk code and the flight number of the flight that triggered the alert is added to the title bar, e.g. "SquawkBox - Connected - Code: 4375, Flight: BMA5HY triggered alert - Filter(Show:7500,7600,7700,4000-4600)". Where the flight number is not available then the registration is shown instead. If that's not available then the modeS is shown. This alert text remains in the title bar until the alert is cancelled via the "Cancel alert" menu option.

This update is on the SquawkBox website at http://www.gfrost.co.uk/SquawkBox/. To get this new feature it is only necessary to replace the exe file if you already have SquawkBox installed.

[Tailwinds]

Wow!...that was quick. Thanks very much Andy. This feature will help immensely.