Your receiver now pays you, every day
Since August the feeder page has said that stations which stay online would get something in return, and next to that line sat a label reading "measuring now". We were measuring, but nothing was paid. Starting today, something is.
How it works
For every UTC day your receiver was up at least 80% of the time, you get Feathers the next morning, and every fifth good day adds Tridents:
- ADS-B receiver: 20 🪶 a day, plus 1 🔱 for every five good days
- AIS receiver: 30 🪶 a day, plus 2 🔱 for every five good days
A month with no gaps comes to about 6 Tridents for an aircraft receiver and about 12 for a ship receiver. We kept Tridents small on purpose. They're the prestige currency. (Update, 25 September: receiver Tridents now count towards prestige stars and the prestige board as well, see Your receiver now counts towards prestige.) Feathers are where a receiver really pays, and you can spend them on boosters. If you run both bands, you're paid for both. AIS pays more because there are far fewer of those receivers: five in the whole network right now, and the water they hear is water nobody else is feeding us.
If you run several receivers on the same band, your best one counts, once. Three antennas on one roof hear the same sky, so they're paid as one.
A day is judged after it ends, over all 1440 minutes. A day with no data at all counts as zero, so a receiver that sat unplugged for a week can't hide that behind a good weekend. Your station's first day is the exception: it counts from the first packet, as long as you had at least six hours of it.
Founding Feeders
The feeder page also promised that the first twenty stations to deliver data would become Founding Feeders. That's now written down on the stations themselves. The owners get the «Founding Feeder» title right away. On top of that comes a one-off 25 🔱, paid with the station's first paid day: a few of the first twenty registered and then went quiet, and the grant waits for them until they are back. After that it's an extra 10 🪶 on every paid day, on each band. The number stays with the station for good, even if it goes quiet for a while.
Founding for ship receivers
Ship receivers get a Founding programme of their own, with more places than the aircraft one: the first 25 AIS stations to deliver data become Founding Ship Feeders. An AIS antenna hears tens of kilometres of water, an aircraft antenna hundreds of kilometres of sky, so covering the same coast takes many more ship receivers, and we need them.
It works like the aircraft version: the «Founding Ship Feeder» title right away, 25 🔱 once the station has a paid AIS day, and the same extra Feathers on paid days. The two programmes count separately. Ship stations no longer take places among the first twenty aircraft ones, and if you're Founding on both bands you get both titles and both grants. Four places are taken today, so there's plenty of room, and the counter on the feeder page shows how many are left.
Early Supporters
Some of you have been around since before the network had a name, testing builds, reporting bugs and bringing friends. We now mark that by hand with an Early Supporter status. It's a smaller version of Founding: the «Early Supporter» title and 12 🔱 when we give it, then 5 🪶 extra on every paid day. If you hold both, you get the Founding rates.
More scans, too
If five of your last seven days were paid, the feeder perk switches on: 40 paid radar scans a day instead of 25, and 6 hangar refreshes instead of 2. Scans inside our own network's coverage were already free and still are.
You don't have to fly
About half the people who run a station have never taken off in the game, and that's fine. The Exchange at /my/exchange is a normal web page. What it sells, like profile themes, banners, name styles, titles and frame glows, appears next to your station on the station leaderboard and on your station's own page. You can also buy an item and give it to someone with a note.
Where to see it
The "Your coins" block on /feed shows what a good day pays you, how yesterday went, what you've earned so far and whether the perk is on. Each payout also appears in your notification bell.
The first payout arrives tomorrow morning, for today. If a day you think should have paid didn't, write to us in Discord #feeders with your station code and we'll look at the numbers together.
To join, the one-line setup for both bands is on the feeder page, and the ships side has its own page at /ais.