Stations have a class now — and a page worth opening
If you feed us, your station has had a public page for a while. It could tell you the uptime, the streak, the range, the positions counted — and it never once said whether any of that was good, or showed you a single aircraft.
Both of those changed today.
Signal, and the class it buys
Every station now has a Signal score out of 1000, and a class from the airspace ladder: G · E · D · C · B · A. A is the top, as in the sky.
It comes from five parts, and the page shows all five with their numbers, because a score nobody can take apart is a score nobody trusts — and the parts double as advice, since the smallest bar is the cheapest thing to raise:
- uptime — was it there
- sky heard — how much traffic, on a log scale
- days fed — the boring virtue, rewarded
- heard alone — aircraft nobody else in the network picked up
- collected — how many ended up in somebody's collection
Three deliberate choices are worth spelling out.
The volume part is logarithmic. Where an antenna stands is not its owner's achievement. Counted linearly, a rooftop over a busy approach would sit ten classes above a village and the village would switch off. Twelve times the traffic is worth about one class here, not five.
Hearing things alone is worth a lot. It is the one part a crowded sky cannot fake, and it is exactly what a receiver in an empty region does better than anyone. A quiet station with real solo catches lands in the same class as a busy one without them — we checked, because that was the whole point.
Nothing about your location is scored. Range would have been the obvious component, and it is deliberately missing: range needs your antenna coordinates, coordinates are optional on purpose, and a score that quietly pays you for giving up privacy is a score that lies about the option. Range is on the page. It does not buy a class.
Tabs, and a wall of aircraft
The page had grown into one long column where four different questions hid behind each other. It is now four tabs: Overview (how it is doing, what it gave), Sky, Coverage (the horizon rose), History (a month of days). A tab that would open on nothing is not offered at all.
Sky is the new one. Every aircraft this station heard that somebody has since caught, as the same photo cards you see in a collection — because that is what they are. Group them by type, by airline, or leave them flat; sort by rarity or alphabetically. Aircraft nobody else in the network heard carry solo on the rarity ribbon.
The wording under it stays careful: heard here, then caught by somebody. Never "this station served that catch" — a catch can be served by the paid fallback source, and the page will not claim more than the data supports.