Newbie Questions

[NickJackson]

I've been using the Radarbox for 24 hours and found out a lot about the product already.  Questions that don't seem to obvious at the moment are:-

1)
Does the 'My Log' report flights picked up by the hardware box only?

2)
When I maxmise my window, the AirNav Radarbox window extends beyond the viewable area such that some fields/boxes are obscured and unusable.  Is there a way a setting the display so that screen fits properly when maximised?

3)
I don't really need to see the photos, logos, aircraft silhouettes all of the time but I do want to see a list of flights picked up.   It looks like you can only turn off both photos etc. and the flight list together.  Is this correct?

Re; the above, in the demo version you could get a pop-up window with the pertinent flight info when you put your mouse over the radar plot.  Is this still available.

4)
Using the reporter or another feature is it possible to create reports with bespoke content, subject to the limitations of the source data in the database?  I'd really like to include some flight level, heading, lattitude/longtitude info, although this may mean more than one record per flight on the report.

5)
In 'My Log'  about 10% of the ModeS codes don't have any registration/flight details.  Are these aircraft that have Mode S but no ADS-B equipment?

Please accept my apologies if I'm running over old ground here.  BTW: I'm running software version 2.01 on Windows XP with firmware 02.03.1

Thanks
Nick

[landyman]

I bought my AirNav on Friday and am having similar problems.   There is so much that is not covered in the help.  As an example, the 'Start Tour' (beginning of 3rd toolbar) just starts a revolving count down.  Nothing else happens.

The program runs very slow especially when attempting to use the menu.  The egg timer appears and nothing else happens.

The list of aircraft jumps from right to left and up and down, making it virtually useless.

I have an Acer M464 with an Intel Core2 duo CPU E4700 @ 2.60GHz.  1.7GB RAM at 2.6GHz.  The screen is an Hanns·G, which is a tall screen 1280x1024 pixels, so not a small wide screen.

No other program exhibits these problems.  I'd give the version of software etc, which I would expect to find in in the 'Help ¦ About', but I've not the time to wait for it to display!

CPU usage is low according to 'Windows Task Manager'.  So what's happening?

The box is working as I've got 36 local aircraft in the list with the std antenna inside my window.

The network has over 560 aircraft, so is this causing the slowdown?

This is without any other program running, naturally apart from Avira and ZoneAlarm.

[AirNav Support]

landyman try the latest beta on the forum see whether that fixes your problems. Also there is a manual on the forum and also in the beta install which is 100 pages long who should helping in explaining functions.

1.) Only hardware
2.) Never seen this, what screen size and resoultion are you using?
3.) In File -> Pregerences you can turn of the details you mention
4.) You would need external software for this
5.) These aircraft which we don't have details to what they are yet, probally likely to be military aircraft or new aircraft.

[MrT]

I'm also curious about the 'Start Tour' button.

What happened to the tour? I presume a guided demo should run ?

[pjm]

5.) These aircraft which we don't have details to what they are yet, probally likely to be military aircraft or new aircraft.

There don't seem to be ANY details of the Australian military aircraft in the database, although (as pointed out by Allocator I think) the details ARE available on airframes.org.

Some of these planes are 10 or more years old, so I think by now most of them should have made it into the AirNav databases!!

Can someone have a look at getting the AirNav databases up to date, and distributing the updates to the users please.

DaveReid also pointed out an issue with the aircraft types of a significant number being incorrect.

http://www.airnavsystems.com/forum/index.php?topic=3516.msg34251#msg34251

[Terre]

Function of the "Start Tour" button:

It's a flight tour feature, that scrolls over all tracked flights automatically. You can see it working by watching the (moving) pointer (black triangle on the left of the grid) and the changing corresponding aircraft details shown in the MyFlight list of the interface.

[Allocator]

5.) These aircraft which we don't have details to what they are yet, probally likely to be military aircraft or new aircraft.

There don't seem to be ANY details of the Australian military aircraft in the database, although (as pointed out by Allocator I think) the details ARE available on airframes.org.

Some of these planes are 10 or more years old, so I think by now most of them should have made it into the AirNav databases!!

Can someone have a look at getting the AirNav databases up to date, and distributing the updates to the users please.

DaveReid also pointed out an issue with the aircraft types of a significant number being incorrect.

http://www.airnavsystems.com/forum/index.php?topic=3516.msg34251#msg34251

RadarBox comes with a comprehensive aircraft database, but like all such lists, it would have been out of date the day it was published.  To overcome this, AirNav entered an agreement with the Gatwick Aviation Society (GAS) to gain access to their volunteer maintained database to auto-populate the RB database whenever a new aircraft is detected.  It's not foolproof, but it is very good.

If the Australian military aircraft are not in the GAS database, then these aircraft details will not be populated.  For the GAS guys to know about these aircraft, they have to be told, so this is where everybody can help out. There is a form on their site for submitting aircraft details and by doing this you help everybody who uses the database, not just RadarBox users.

So, when you say "Can somebody take a look at getting the database up to date" it's all down to us to help :-)

http://www.gatwickaviationsociety.org.uk/introduction.asp

[pjm]

So, when you say "Can somebody take a look at getting the database up to date" it's all down to us to help :-)

http://www.gatwickaviationsociety.org.uk/introduction.asp

Interesting... I wasn't aware that the users were indirectly populating the database for AirNav, or how they did it. I'd have thought AirNav would have people or perhaps multiple sources of information and be correlating the info themselves.

No doubt the information is published somewhere and I just haven't read it.

Of the last 6 Australian Airforce planes that RB knows nothing about 5 of them are listed in the  airframes.org database, and one of them dates back to 1999. Seems the Gatwick mob aren't really that interested in Australian planes despite saying they have "complete registers" for them!

7CF830
7CF837
7CF8BF
7CF83A
7CF85E

Seems a bit "hit and miss" where users have to notice info is missing and then try and source it from other websites, so they can cut & paste it into the GAS database.

Nonetheless, I'll cut & paste the airframes.org (when I see it)  info if that is what is required!

[pjm]

Nonetheless, I'll cut & paste the airframes.org (when I see it)  info if that is what is required!

maybe not - when I try to add them I get a "page cannot be found" error message!

here are the details if anyone else knows how to add them:

A97-440    Lockheed Martin    C-130J-30 Hercules   C30J   5440    L4T          7CF830   Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF)   1997      2000-07

A97-464    Lockheed Martin    C-130J-30 Hercules   C30J   5464    L4T         7CF837   Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF)         1999-09-07

A32-346    Raytheon         B300 King Air 350   B350   FL-346    L2T          7CF8BF   ASY - RAAF   2002      2003

A97-467    Lockheed Martin    C-130J-30 Hercules   C30J   5467     L4T         7CF83A   Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF)         2000

A37-001    Bombardier (Canadair)    CL-600-2B16 Challenger 604   CL60   5521   L2J      7CF85E RAAF

[DaveReid]

here are the details if anyone else knows how to add them

Well if you really want to do things the hard way, open up your favourite SQLite editor, load the NavData.db3 database and use SQL statements like:

Insert into Aircraft (MS, AR, AT, AN, AC, CN) Values ('7CF8BF', 'A32-346', 'B350', 'Raytheon B300 King Air 350', 'Australia - Air Force', 'FL-346 ');

But, as I mentioned in a previous post, hopefully all this will become academic in a few weeks' time when the mechanism for maintaining and propagating database updates and, equally importantly, validating aircraft details, photos, ICAO codes, etc is completely overhauled.

Ideally we should have reached this stage by now, but V3's protracted gestation period has understandably delayed things a bit.

[pjm]

Well if you really want to do things the hard way, open up your favourite SQLite editor, load the NavData.db3 database and use SQL statements like:

Thanks - but I have no idea how SQLite works, I've updated my own database via the database explorer interface. I was trying to update it at the source so everyone would benefit, and it would only have to be done once.

But, as I mentioned in a previous post, hopefully all this will become academic in a few weeks' time when the mechanism for maintaining and propagating database updates and, equally importantly, validating aircraft details, photos, ICAO codes, etc is completely overhauled.

Ideally we should have reached this stage by now, but V3's protracted gestation period has understandably delayed things a bit.

So this mechanism will get all the Australian RAAF aircraft, and other various/missing data in the current AirNav database??

[DaveReid]

So this mechanism will get all the Australian RAAF aircraft, and other various/missing data in the current AirNav database??

Clearly no database will ever be 100% comprehensive and up-to-date, but yes, you can reasonably expect that frequently-seen military aircraft should be covered.

What will also be fixed, rest assured, are all the fictitious type codes, inconsistent airline names, etc, that can currently be found in the database - can anyone enlighten me as to what an "OLDP" or "HLAC" is, for example, or why we need 4 different spellings of Air Méditerranée ?

[Allocator]

Interesting... I wasn't aware that the users were indirectly populating the database for AirNav, or how they did it. I'd have thought AirNav would have people or perhaps multiple sources of information and be correlating the info themselves.

I think that you are missing the point here somewhat.  There is no complete worldwide aircraft database as far as I'm aware.  I'm sure that all the licencing authorities of individual countries have such databases (G-INFO for the UK for instance), but not one database.

When RadarBox was first launched, you got the database that came with it and that was it.  You could manually update the database using Database Explorer (as you still can), but there was no integration with any on-line sources.

AirNav worked with the GAS team to arrange access to the GAS data and I'm sure that this was not a free option - but RB users got the database auto-populate software update for free anyway.  You expect AirNav to maintain the database and I'm sure that they could if they employed a team to do it - are you prepared to pay for this?

So, if you help the VOLUNTARY UNPAID GAS team to update the database, you are not populating the database for AirNav, you are improving a resource that is used by very many aviation enthusiasts around the world, including those who use the SBS-1 which also uses the GAS data.

I hope that this helps you understand the whole database issue.

[Allocator]

Nonetheless, I'll cut & paste the airframes.org (when I see it)  info if that is what is required!

maybe not - when I try to add them I get a "page cannot be found" error message!

here are the details if anyone else knows how to add them:

Use Database Explorer.  You can cut/paste, but you have to do it for every data cell, so I usually just type in the details.  It's fine if you are just doing a few aircraft, but tedious if you are doing a lot.  Many of the Brit Mil aircraft don't appear in any databases, but a bit of detective work on this and the Kinetic forum has produced great results.  Adding the aircraft as they are 'found' is one of the most enjoyable aspects for me :-)

See the Video Tutorials either on the AirNav Youtube Channel of in the RadioBox support section on the main AirNav website.

Of course, this only updates you own NavData.db3 database, not any external on-line database.

[Pinza]

Oh Wow!

I received my AirNav setup last Wednesday. Wondered whether I'd pickup anything as I live in a groundfloor apartment. Needn't have worried - plenty of traffic received - albeit in one direction only!

Currently using only the included standard aerial. Is sitting outside the window ledge of my bay window - outside is important - double glazing seems to affect signal badly!

My package came with an included Radar-Rama external antenna - which I may install shortly.

Have had great results so far, but decided to install version 3.01 beta tonight.

Seems to be a great improvement - receiving signals more frequently etc.

Only pain was that 'my logs' seems to be empty! I made a backup of my db3 files before upgrading - any chance of getting my data back?

Two more questions:

1) How do I enter my home location? I have a GPS fix nearby (not home - but near enough) of N52 23.803 W001 15.979. This is in decimal WGS84 co-ords - whatever that means!

2) How does the aircraft 'status' work?

I have seen take off, climb, levelled, cruise, descent, approach, landing.

All self-explanatory - but is there any FL or rate of ascent/descent or landing gear up or down that dictates when this status change takes place?

Apologies if I'm asking questions that have already been answered on this forum?

Am thrilled with what I've seen so far - can't wait until I manage to erect a proper external antenna!

Chris Walker
Rugby, UK