City of Rotterdam embraces Explane app

Rotterdam is the first municipality in the world to support the Explane app for measuring aircraft noise.

This confirmed alderman Arno Bonte (GroenLinks) last Wednesday in a committee meeting of the Rotterdam city council.

Mayor Aboutaleb and the aldermen think the Explane app is a welcome addition to the DCMR environmental reporting system.

The alderman finds the app user-friendly and works well. “We will actively offer the app to residents of our city.”

Putting results together
Bonte believes that the app can work well in addition to the usual way of reporting from the environment service via the website or by telephone for years. “Afterwards we simply compare the results.” Read more >

No airplane captured (3)

Sometimes our app Explane says ‘No airplane captured’ after you have tried to measure the sound level of a passing aircraft.

We have asked our developer Roelof Meijer what the reasons can be for this annoying warning. He came up with several checks the app does before registering your measurement.

  • If there is no data available from the transponder of the plane (latitude, longitude, altitude) or if a plane is not equipped with a transponder (mostly older aircraft).
  • If the data available from the transponder is older than 15 seconds, the location data of the airplane is too old to be useful.
  • If the download of the transponder data takes more than 4 seconds. For example if you have a bad internet connection.
  • Read more >