For over a year I have seen this issue where aircraft will fly over my location or land at the local airport they often just disappear off F24 without the receiver changing to my receiver which has a very strong signal from the aircraft . It doesn't happen all of the time but it happens often. Recently we have had several aircraft working from the local airport just a few km's from my station fighting fires and about 50% of the time the position reports stop rather than switching receivers.
If my receiver is the one being used when the aircraft is a long way out then the position reports are very regular all the way into landing and on the ground but if another receiver is tracking the aircraft as it comes in and then loses the signal then often it will disappear off the radar due to no position reports, it may appear minutes latter when its on the ground stationary, received from my receiver. All of this time I see the same aircraft on ADSB scope and I have a visual line of site to the airport from the location of the receiver (which is at 1400 feet on a tower on top of a hilltop).
I contacted FR24 last year about this issue the response was, yes we know about the problem and are working on it. It's now a year latter and the same thing still happens. So I contacted support again, supplying images of the issue, images of FR24 and images of my ADSB. No response. I tried again about a week latter with updated information ... no response .. that was several weeks ago now.
It's really disappointing that FR24 don't seem to care about these fairly serious bugs in their system and also disappointing that they don't respond to their volunteers who are spending time trying to help get issues fixed.
Has anyone else noticed this issue ?
I uploaded an example from today, one of many examples of this behaviour. This aircraft was at 7000ft, the red mark is my station, it is online and tracking the aircraft yet you can see the position reports stop approximately 20km then it switches to another receiver. My receiver had a good signal on this aircraft for perhaps 150km and is skipped completely even when the aircraft is almost overhead and has no signal from any other station. I know it is not MLAT as it is on my ADSB.
I have spend allot of money and time getting and keeping this receiver running ontop of a hill at 1400 feet running on solar and batteries so it will have a good reception of aircraft at lower altitudes, yet it is not being used properly by FR24.
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