Lisbon Finals has always measured on its own — one station, one terrace, one set of sensors. Finals Network is the plan to change that: multiple independent stations, each honest about its own numbers, cross-checking each other instead of asking anyone to take our word for it. Today that stopped being a plan and became a working example.
Alessandro Annunziato runs SensorGrid, an independent noise-monitoring network near Malpensa airport in Italy, and for the past few days we have been feeding him our own live sound data. Today he sent back the missing piece: an endpoint that returns his platform own official noise calculation for our station — computed the way regulators actually do it, not just raw numbers passed back and forth. That calculation now sits live on the site, right next to our own independent version of the same thing. Two different measurement chains, two different people, landing within about 2dB of each other on the same real flights. When they do not fully agree — networks have off days — the page falls back to our own number rather than showing nothing, always marked honestly as which is which.
The rest of the day went into making that comparison actually readable: a toggle called Expert Mode on the Noise Data page, laying the official Leq_dn and EU Lden next to what we measure directly, peak by peak, flight by flight — plus a deeper look at Italy own event-based LVA standard for anyone who wants to go further. All of it translated into Portuguese and French, not just English.
Also fixed today: the photo-scoring model, which had been quietly failing on a specific kind of shot — a widebody against an overcast sky used to score worse than it deserved, misread as a bad photo instead of a hard lighting condition. Retrained on our own images instead of a generic dataset, and the difference showed immediately.
Quiet conversations are also underway with a few people interested in hosting a node of their own somewhere else along the approach. Nothing to announce yet, but the network is starting to have more than one person name on it.
One station validating its own claims only goes so far. A network of them, each willing to be checked, goes further.