Since my subscription to the network ceased I'm getting far more live aircraft and at greater range in Beta 3.07. I'm seeing an increase of some 30% aircraft and up to 614 messages/sec whereas I never saw more than 300 messages/sec before.
Tom
Same here.
I've not tested this, and I only bought my RB at the beginning of this month, so have little experience of RB. But have been using and programming personal computers for over 30 years. In 1978 I had a box connected between a radio and an 8KB, CBM PET which displayed the received data.
I would like to know in outline, how the RB system works. This would help in understanding problems that I and others experience.
I suspect that the black box is multi-part. It has a receiver and probably a decoder, but this may be done in software on the PC. There is also a dongle within the black box as the program wont display internet data without a connected RB. (For young readers, a dongle was hardware connected to a PC port to protect a program from running without paying for it.)
When I first saw the high number of msgs/Sec my immediate concern was the high number and how could so many packets be processed in that time. I don't know the size of these packets so was unable to do the math, but it looks to be to be too high a number for all to be processed every second.
So is this why there are so many faults reported by users? The PC is unable to handle everything.
The RB program has to:-
1. react to user input
2. react to black box data
3. react to internet data.
4. update the list
5. update the map
6. select and display alerts.
7. keep MyLog updated
8. handle the various outputs to ports
etc.
All these are probably in separate threads, so which have higher priority?
If the data is decoded in the black box, does it have a buffer, so that data that can't be accepted by the program, is not lost?
Clearly the company relies heavily on it's customers to provide debugging support and there is nothing wrong in this, providing the released version (V-2.01 today) works satisfactorily. I leave users to make their own decision on that point! Perhaps if more information about how the system (black box & program) works was available, then customers would be better able to report on problems experienced.
As Windows is a multitasking OS, then the processor has to continue with other programs in the background.
So are the 'Requirements' as printed on the sales box realistic? I would suggest they are probably wrong, unless RB is the only program running (apart from internet protection software).
This PC is less that a year old. It arrived with Vista partly installed, so I completed that and immediately 'upgraded' to XP Pro with the supplied OEM disks. It has an Intel Core2 Duo CPU running at 2.6GHz and has 1.7GB of 2.60GHz RAM. But it is not a 'games' PC with a fast screen controller.
I've now given up running RB while doing other work on the PC as the frequent delays caused by RB are too annoying.
So are live packets received by radio lost due to the lack of a data buffer?
This bottleneck in processing could also be the reason for other problems such as I reported in another thread here whereby aircraft that cause an 'Alert' to pop-up are not listed on the main screen and then fly 200 feet overhead a few moments latter?
Reg
