Thank you, do I understand that all aircraft are already listed and only new aircraft or those that change the codes will be populated from the server?
What happens if I'm not connected to the internet or if I'm in a foreign country?
RadarBox comes with a very large and comprehensive database. However, like all databases that store changing information, it will be out of date as soon as it is released. This means that if you never connected your PC running RadarBox to the Internet, you would get the vast majority of aircraft details from the database that comes with RB. Of course, not all aircraft would show, as the newer aircraft might not have been around when the database was created. Also, there will be aircraft in the database that are no longer flying and their Mode S codes might have been reallocated to new aircraft. So the situation would be:
- some aircraft details would be correct
- some aircraft details would be wrong
- some aircraft would show no details at all
This will be the same wherever you use RB in the world, although there might be fewer aircraft details showing if you are in one of the more "remote" parts of the world.
Now, if you connect to the Internet and RB picks up an aircraft without details, either live or by the network, then RB will look at the database on the AirNav server and see if the details are there. If they are, then the RB database on you PC will be autopopulated.
If you disconnect from the Internet and use your RB without the connection, all those records are still there in the database, including the autopopulated records, so you will at least see all the aircraft details you already have. You will get no details for "new" aircraft as you're not connected to the Internet.
When you connect to the Internet again, autopopulate will start working again.
This is complicated a bit as if you have a partial record already in the RB database - say with the aircraft type as "..." then this record will not be overwritten by the autopopulate function. This is how it should work really, as if you had made a manual edit to a record, you wouldn't want that overwritten with information from the Server.
OK, I hope that explains it. A lot of people seem to be upset by the "incomplete" or "incorrect" data in the RB and/or server database, but as the source databases are usually populated manually by unpaid aircraft enthusiasts, you get what to get - for free!
I'm sure that it would be possible to pay for 100% correct database records from the registration authorities, but can you imagine the cost :-(
I enjoy finding those wrong details in the database and correcting them manually. Many of the military aircraft I track aren't in any of the databases and that makes it even more interesting :-)
