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Old 11th Jan 2020, 13:55
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Geezers of Nazareth
 
Join Date: Aug 2007
Location: West London
Posts: 382
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I can suggest two others that I have experience with ...

Aerodata Quantum (or simply 'ADQ' or just 'Aerodata') is an exceptionally comprehensive database and logging system. There is an up-front cost, and then a yearly subscription, and there are regular updates (at least weekly, quite often it is more than 1 per week). Full details on their web-site.
A friend uses it heavily, and swears by it. I used it for 2 years or so and found a few things that I wasn't happy about (*) and eventually stopped using it.

(*) - when I entered all my sightings I would then spend ages adding all sorts of notes for each aircraft - names, unit marks, colours, special marks, and so on - and then when it came time to add them to the database I discovered that I'd already seen all the aircraft and my time had been wasted!
I was also not happy with the human interface - tabbing between fields and buttons was not logical.
One part that was useful was the ability to create a report for any given location showing what was based there, so you could create some sort of checklist before you went - handy for smaller airfields or museums, but not so handy for major world airports.


From Aerodata I moved on to Planebase, which was (and still is) free. The creators have put a lot of work into getting their data correct, but it is obvious from the way it is all constructed that they are more interested in biz-jets than anything else. It's a few years since I stopped using Planebase, but I seem to remember that their coverage was not as comprehensive as Aerodata. One of my reasons for stopping with Planebase was my inability to find a lot of stuff that I was looking for. In a number of cases I could see airframes within the database (I had the ability to look at the database without using the interface/screens) but I could not find them via the screens.
My 'niggle' with Aerodata wasn't repeated in Planebase - I'd enter a long list of sightings from a day out, it would tell me which ones I needed, and then I could add sighting details for just those few. A much better solution for me.
For the past year or so they have changed the 'sign up' process so that you need to be recommended by an existing user (it's all detailed on the front page of their web-site), but as I don't know anybody who uses the software I can't see me going back to it in the forseeable future.

Both systems can be interfaced with various ADSB systems, if that's your thing.

I'm still on the look-out for an alternative, but everything that I've seen so far either doesn't really cover what I want, or is an on-line system.
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