Aircraft are now drawn as the kind of aircraft they say they are. Every ADS-B identification message carries an aircraft category alongside the callsign — light aeroplane, airliner, heavy, helicopter, glider, microlight, unmanned, or a vehicle on the ground — and FoxSDR was stepping over it to reach the callsign. It is now decoded, and the map and the radar scope give each its own silhouette.
A jumbo does not look like a Cessna, and neither looks like a helicopter. A light aircraft has a short straight wing; a glider has very long thin ones; a microlight is a swept delta with no tail; a helicopter is a rotor disc rather than a winged shape at all. Heavy differs from an airliner by wingspan at the same length, not by being drawn larger — a bigger symbol on a map reads as a nearer one, which would be a depth cue that is not there.
An aircraft that states no category looks exactly as it always has. Roughly one in twenty-five does not say, and those keep the shape this application has always drawn. Measured over six minutes of real sky before any of this was built: of the 33 aircraft that identified themselves, 32 stated a category.
Requires the ADS-B plugin at 1.8.0 or newer, which is in the plugin store now. An older plugin simply reports nothing about the category and every aircraft keeps the plain shape, so nothing breaks if you do not update it.
Also in this release: the map and the radar scope now share one set of aircraft symbols instead of keeping two hand-maintained copies, so the two pictures can no longer drift apart.
SHA-256 of foxsdr-setup-0.99.13.exe:
143a1b2fbfa475792001faba3c7d1b000b91fa1c8185b8298b9c009851175b6b