Live traffic injector

Heads up on this very promising mod.
Early days yet, but its working and gives more traffic.
Model matching is developing, author is working on the ivao rules.

Works well for me, who isnt too pickety, and just wants some traffic!

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I keep hoping someone does a mod that reads directly from a local ADS-B receiver. This mod may do about the same but I’d like to see what my receiver sees in real time in my reception area. Will give this one a shot, though. Thanks!

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There is some support for flight sims in Virtual Radar Server. I have used this software but haven’t tried the MSFS connection yet. I’m not completely sure it’s injecting live data into the sim or simply displaying sim traffic.
https://www.virtualradarserver.co.uk/FlightSimulator.aspx

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So, I just get a page full of flights
 Are they meant to be in msfs2020 as live looking aircraft??? I don’t see it

Been sorting this software and it works really well!

ELT gets its info from FlightRadar24. If you open a browser to their map view and look where you are, you should be able to see the aircraft in your area that you should see in the sim. You can use the FlightRadar map view to see where the planes are. There is a slight delay so they don’t match completely but they are close - much closer than the FlightAware 5 minute delay with the sim’s built-in real world traffic.

For ELT to inject traffic you have to be spawned in. It only injects traffic you can see from your location so it needs your location first.

You also need to edit the settings.json file to point to your community folder. You can’t just drop ELT somewhere and run it. You have to set your community folder location so it can find your aircraft that it can refer to to inject the traffic. If all you see are Airbuses, the community folder variable isn’t set or isn’t set correctly.

Last bit is traffic is apparently reported differently once it is determined as being on ground. The position updates are much farther apart in time so the planes jump around a bit on the ground when parked (noise in the reported location) and teleport when taxiing. Once airborne, the teleporting stops and you get smooth updates. You can see these behaviors in the FlightRadar24 map view. It’s just the data itself but the dev is working on smoothing.

Aircraft headings and bank angles can be off too. ADS-B is a bit slow on heading updates for some reason. I was flying with a real world 172 that was flying a 360 while sightseeing I guess. The airplane heading was lagging through the turn but once the pilot went back to flying straight, it caught up.

I was messing around with it too
 let’s keep my opinion out of it for now


Question: how do you know it’s this app and not ‘Live Traffic’ of the sim generating the planes? Should that be on or off? Bit unclear


Having multiple links to different software makes it a bit unclear, but I think you’re reacting to the flightradarserver link
 I think that one is only to show what’s flying in the sim itself
 so from sim to map
 not from application to sim.

Wow, that is an amazing response. Is there a step by step how to do this anywhere? thanks for your reply.

The aircraft injected by Enhanced Live Traffic don’t have labels but those injected by the built-in real-world traffic do have labels (if you have labels visible). I have the built-in traffic off. The built-in is delayed 5 minutes by FlightAware so you won’t see twin aircraft, but no need to see the delayed duplicates. (Edit - you may see twins on the ground if the plane is running but not moving as in waiting to take off, at deicing stations, etc.)

The ELT traffic is a superset of the built-in capability of the sim. Somewhere (don’t recall where) I saw that what MS/Asobo shows only airliner traffic but ELT shows everything that broadcasts ADS-B and whatever other data sources are in use.

Okay thanks. I’ll try one more time, but with Live Traffic off. I did try that already, but then it didn’t do anything
 I’ll give it another go.

Not yet but it’s pretty easy. Just from memory


  1. Unzip the files into a directory.
  2. Edit the Settings.json file to point to your community folder. Mine is a nonstandard location but here is the syntax - he requires double slashes.

For my install, this is my path in quotes: “K:\\FS2020Stuff\\Community\\”. (Note - this appeared incorrectly when I first posted - the message board collapsed double backslashes into single. This looks right now in my browser. The important thing is to use double backslashes in the settings.json file.)

If you don’t put that path in or do it with typos or other to make it invalid, all you will see are the default Airbus liners.

  1. Start FS2020 and ELT. I don’t think order matters.
  2. AFTER you spawn into the sim (ELT needs your location), press the connect button in ELT. In a few moments you should see the list of aircraft start populating with aircraft withing range of your location and should start seeing them in the sim as well.

That’s it. While getting used to how this all works, I was looking a lot at the FlightRadar24 map view to see what I should be seeing in the sim and it matches amazingly well. Exactly, actually.

There are some caveats. FlightRadar24 changes what it reports when planes are on the ground. It does not update continually so on the ground aircraft with abruptly move, change heading, etc. That is in the data FlightRadar24 is sending. The real ADS-B data from the aircraft is broadcast every second (give or take) so this is a decision by FlightRadar24 and not ELT’s fault. Mr. Proper is trying to code around it but it may still be a bit odd for planes on the ground.

Headings also seem to not be updated as frequently as position and altitude so aircraft doing higher rate turns might not be pointed the exact right direction. This is another issue with ADS-B and not a problem with the program.

If you don’t see anything, first make sure there are planes to see on the FlightRadar24 map view.

If there are planes to see, there is a little blinky indicator on the ELT window near upper left corner. Is that blinking occasionally and are there aircraft called out in the big window?

I’ve been using this for a few days now and it is indeed very good! As long as the models map to your liveries it works pretty well! For me I’ve turned of the MSFS live traffic and just rely on this for now.

However does anyone know if the author of the program is also reading this forum? Back in the X-Plane days I used a different program for live traffic which uses the free feed from OpenSky Network. This feed is a lot better for on the ground movement of aircraft. Though it still misses out on some of the GA air traffic. Which is why I did pay for the other feed that can be used in that program from RealTraffic. If this program would use a good feed it would be amazing!

Finally a couple of other considerations:

  • Model matching does not allow for Premium Aircraft sadly, due to the nature Asobo has encrypted the aircraft.cfg
  • Matching models in the JSON is tedious, but working. However, it would be nice if the program would remember all the airframes it comes across and let’s you select the model to use in a drop down.
  • The above would not matter if we could use a good model repository. I do believe IVAO is mentioned, however I can’t seem to find any instruction on how to get that working.

Finally, just so everyone is aware: this is a real time feed of air traffic. As these feeds do not have flight plans, MSFS will not be able to provide ATC. So you will not hear any chatter for these planes and you might run into a few :wink:

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Hey,
Good to hear you are happy with my mod :slight_smile: I am working hard on the ground traffic to smooth it. If anyone knows C# and SimConnect, please send me a message here or on flightsim.to.

@EEagle1984NL Premium Aircraft do not work? I thought the aircraft.cfg wouldn’t be encrypted :frowning:

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A feature I’d like to see would be to snag data from a local ADS-B receiver. You can assemble your own from a Raspberry Pi, software defined radio, and an antenna for about $100. I have one and the data stream is updated about every second in air and on ground. Headings still are slow to update but it pins their exact locations. FlightRadar24 gets funky drifting and odd behavior for aircraft on the ground.

But for coms, with real air traffic I can listen to the local frequencies on an air band radio. Or, anyone can listen to airport frequencies at many airports here:

I heard more people about the ADS-B receiver. The problem is, I don’t have one my self, so I don’t know how this works and which data it returns that I can use.

If this is something you’re interested in, I can get the files unless it/they don’t exist. I bet there are logs though. Let me know if you are and I will dig. It would be something that I bet every FBO would would want to set up at their airport to watch traffic on the ground and in the surrounding sky. In terms of general interest, many might not care unless they have something notable or interesting nearby to watch since about the max that these receivers can see is a 250nm radius circle - which is a lot but nowhere near the reach of something like FlightAware or FlightRadar24.

I’m worried that smoothing of ground traffic will only be possible if you start building in a delay
 But that’s why I pointed to the OpenSky network. It will give you a way better feed of traffic without the jumping around on the ground and should be free for non commercial use (they have an API).

The only thing is that you would need to recode your app to take that feed
 but if I had a guess I would think recoding to a different feed is quicker than trying to build in a smoothing option (and less resource intensive). So have a look at OpenSky!

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now part of my ‘‘essential mod’’ list that I start everytime.
GJ!

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Yeah a delay of 10 seconds might be enough.