How the radar works
Once an hour the radar reads the public competition pages of five platforms, the same pages you would open in a browser. It doesn't log in and uses no private interfaces.
- CIVL
- Airtribune
- PWCA
- SRS
- Swiss League
- This site
- Calendar feeds
- Public data
One run, step by step
Read the calendars
Every hour, each platform's list of upcoming competitions. A competition that drops off a list is marked as missing, not deleted.
Check the event pages
Registration counts and status live on each competition's own page. The radar visits it as often as its state calls for: hourly until registration opens, twice a day while it is open or on a waitlist, daily once it has closed. Most runs fetch only a handful of pages.
Join the duplicates
Many competitions are listed on two or three platforms. Listings are joined when one links to the other, or when they share dates, place and a similar name. The platform that takes the registrations becomes the competition's register link.
Find the venue
Where a platform gives no coordinates, the venue's name is looked up once on OpenStreetMap and remembered, so the competition shows on the map.
Publish
The result goes to this site, the calendar feeds and the public data files. A calendar entry changes only when the registration state, the dates or the venue do, so subscribers aren't notified about every new sign-up.
Reading politely
- At most one request per second to any one platform, and it slows down when a platform asks it to. Every request names the radar and its purpose.
- It stays out of what a platform's robots.txt rules off limits.
- No pilot names are kept or published, only counts.
- When a platform can't be read, the radar keeps what it last knew and says so in the table below, rather than showing its competitions as gone.
Platforms and freshness
Data as of .
| Platform | Status | Listings | Last read in full |
|---|---|---|---|
| CIVL | up to date | 52 | |
| Airtribune | up to date | 26 | |
| PWCA | up to date | 10 | |
| SRS | up to date | 7 | |
| Swiss League | up to date | 0 |
- CIVL: the FAI's calendar of sanctioned competitions (Cat 1 and Cat 2), with registration counts.
- Airtribune: registration and live tracking for many national and open competitions; fees and pilot lists.
- PWCA: the Paragliding World Cup and its Pre-PWC qualifiers; states registration openly.
- SRS: the Sports Ranking Series calendar.
- Swiss League: Swiss League and Swiss Cup competitions; states registration openly.