The PlanePlotter software program receives and decodes live digital position reports from aircraft and plots them on a radar-like display.
Hundreds of users share their SBS-1 signals with everyone. This gives you extensive coverage and counteracts any local obstructions that you may have from, for example, hills. The one-off cost for PlanePlotter is Euros 25 + VAT.
There are a number of aircraft, notably military types and Flybe, which show in the listing on the SBS-1 but which do not transmit their position and so do not plot. Provided that there are sufficient suitable users receiving such an aircraft, PlanePlotter can determine the position using the arrival time of the Mode-S transmissions at each user. Multilateration therefore enables them to be plotted. It is free for users who regularly provide raw data into the PlanePlotter system on a near 24/7 basis; other users pay Euro 12 + VAT per year.
For the later SBS-1e/er sets, a facility called Beamfinder and Beamfinder Plus enables PlanePlotter to use the pings from known radar stations to calibrate the radar’s rotating beam and to use that information to locate aircraft not transmitting position. Beamfinder Plus can even locate an aircraft without Mode-S transponder. Both PlanePlotter and Multilateration can be downloaded and used free of charge for 21 days before you have to sign up and pay. Full details are available on its website at http://www.coaa.co.uk/PlanePlotter.htm
One of our members has created two applications to integrate our database with PlanePlotter.
Application 1 (PACModeS2020) builds a personalised version of the basestation.sqb database used by PlanePlotter (and other applications which use that database, such as Kinetics Basestation.exe and Virtual Radar)
Application 2 (PACModesLogging) which runs alongside PlanePlotter to produce a list of Required (RQ) and PaintScrape (Ps) frames, which can quickly be used to log frames directly into the users logbook
A user manual for the applications is available here
