Originally Posted by
DIBO
Please people, stop talking about the tracking accuracy of FR24 as such. This is totally meaningless, unless you add in the discussion that the a/c concerned has ADSB-OUT (meaning pretty precise position, speed data, etc. is available + mode C altitude) or that no adbs was available (only mode C) and FR24 groundstations employed an MLAT (multi-lateration) technique to get a rough position indication (pretty impressive techniques & calculations used, nonetheless the result gives a rough indication at best) and a derived groundspeed and track, calculated with an algorithm that lacks good smoothing logic and certainly can use some improvement.
No argument with any of that. My comments were purely in respect of ADS-B, apologies if I didn't make that clear.
Incidentally, I can probably claim to be among the first to use amateur MLAT (many years before FR24 and its counterparts) when I recruited a small group of fellow early SBS-1 users and captured raw data from the receivers including the 20 MHz clock timestamps, to derive the locations of a number of non-ADS-B aircraft. Having proved that the concept worked, I kind of lost interest in what was just an academic exercise ...