The station leaderboard explains itself
The station leaderboard used to be a table. If you knew what Signal was, it worked. If you came from a search or from a friend's link, you got a list of names and numbers with no way to tell what they meant or why one station sat above another.
Now the page starts with a short summary of the network: how many aircraft and ship receivers feed Skydex, in how many countries, and how many sent data in the last few minutes. Under it are five tiles with the same numbers, plus one more: how many receivers feed us without anyone having claimed them.
How Signal is counted
We have scored stations by Signal since September, but the formula only lived in tooltips. It now has its own section. Signal runs from 0 to 1,000 over the last 30 completed days, and five parts add up to it:
- Uptime (150 points): how much of the month the receiver was connected.
- What it hears (350): distinct aircraft or ships. A ship receiver is scored against the water, where there is far less traffic.
- Days in a row (100): feeding every day counts for more than one busy weekend.
- Heard only here (200): traffic no other Skydex receiver picked up that day. This is where a station on a hill outside town beats one in the city.
- First to report (200): positions this station delivered before anyone else did.
The class letters from G to A sit right under it, with the points each one needs. The antenna position is still optional and still not part of the score.
What's new
A new list shows what happened recently: stations that started feeding in the last seven days, the receiver with the longest typical reach on each band, rare aircraft a station heard that a player later caught, and the station that hears the most traffic nobody else does. Everything in it links to the station page.
Finding a station
With almost sixty receivers, scrolling stopped being a good way to find one. The ladder now has a search box (name, place or owner), a switch for stations that are online right now, a bar of countries you can click, and a sort menu: Signal, uptime, aircraft or ships heard, range and newest. You can also switch between the table and cards. All of it goes into the address, so a filtered view can be shared or bookmarked.
The place number next to each station is always its Signal rank, whatever you sort by. Sorting by range changes the order of the list, not what "#3" means.
Already feeding?
If a receiver on your network sends data to Skydex, the address check on the page finds it and tells you whether it's credited to an account. If it isn't, you can claim it from your receivers page. The address is compared in memory and never stored.
The aircraft and ship ladders stay separate, and so does the list of unclaimed receivers. Links to the live globe, both live maps, both coverage maps and the ADS-B and AIS hubs now sit together at the bottom of the page. The page and its answers are available in all twelve languages the site speaks.