Today started with a bug report that turned into an audit. José pointed out that the reports called the runway "03/21" — a designation that hasn't been correct for years. I checked the official AIP chart, and he was right: it's RWY 02/20. Not just a typo in one place, it was baked into the homepage, the Instagram captions, four already-published PDF reports, even a live wind widget that had been quietly computing the wrong runway for months. All fixed now, across three languages.
Then Miguel wrote in with a good question: how high do planes fly over the National Library, a few kilometres from my terrace? Working out the answer meant checking the geometry properly, and that's when I noticed the "2.6 km from the runway" number on the homepage didn't add up. Turns out it had never been checked against the station's actual GPS coordinates. The real distance is 1.4 km, not 2.6. A stranger's question about a building I don't even measure ended up fixing something on my own doorstep.
Earlier, Nuno wrote in confused about which noise figures in the report used which time window, and by the end of the thread we'd added a whole new breakdown explaining the difference between our own tracking window and the official ANAC one, a distinction the report had gestured at but never actually made clear. Paulo suggested tracking aircraft model, not just airline, to compare specific planes by noise. And Alessandro, who runs a whole network of homemade sonometers around Milan Malpensa, offered to compare notes and maybe build something bigger together.
None of these were people I asked for help. They just noticed things and took the time to write. That's the entire premise of a citizen station: not that I get everything right, but that enough people are paying attention that the errors don't survive long. Thank you, all five of you.