Month: August 2019

Sometimes our app doesn’t catch the airplane you are trying to measure. This can have various reasons.

The identification of the specific aircraft is retrieved in real time from the database of the Open Sky Network at the start of every measurement. This means that your phone needs to have a good and stable internet connection to be able to receive this information.

If your internet connection is not stable enough, it will not be able to determine the ID. Also sometimes there can be a lag in the availability of the data. Or the database can be unavailable for technical reasons.

Dependent
We are dependent on that data to determine the ID. Since we do not registrate measurement without flight data for obvious reasons, you will not be able to send in that measurement. Read more >

Just before the summer holidays we organized a calibration day with a large number of volunteers to find out to what extent the measurements with the free Explane app correspond to the real noise level. On average, Explane appears to deviate only 2 dB from a calibrated dB meter.

Explane.org and SchipholWatch are very happy with these results, especially since the measurements with Explane now appear to be more reliable than the calculations by the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure & Water Management and those of Amsterdam Schiphol Airport.

‘6 dB is within expected margins’
As a reminder: the measurements of a test flight mid-last year (‘experience flight’) were sometimes as much as 6 dB higher than the previously calculated values. The minister, Cora van Nieuwenhuizen, called this deviation “well within the expected margins”. Read more >

Since a few weeks our app shows an error warning from Google Maps. We will soon repair this. The warning does NOT affect the functionality of the app, so you can keep sending us your noise registrations.

The warning is actually very positive news. It tells us that our period of free use of Google Maps is over. We now have to pay for the use. This is a direct result of the wide and intensive use of the app. When we started it, we did not expect so many users and so many registrations in such a short period.

We now already have 70,000 registrations of aviation noise in our database. A technical university in The Netherlands will research the data, and we are invited to insert the Explane-data in a ‘civic science’ project of the Dutch health research institute. Read more >