Methodology & trust

How the Radar is built

The Radar exists to answer one commercial question for Hampton Roads facilities and infrastructure vendors: which government opportunities can a firm like yours realistically pursue, and what should you do next? Everything below is in service of making that answer checkable.

Sources

• SAM.gov public opportunity search — every notice with a Virginia place of performance, queried per trade category, every week. This is the same public record any contractor can open; we never touch authenticated or private portals.
• Raw responses are stored immutably with a content hash, so every downstream claim can be traced to the exact record it came from.

Filtering & classification

• Notices are classified into facilities trades (HVAC, electrical, plumbing, general construction, maintenance, janitorial, grounds, welding/fabrication, access control) — NAICS code first, descriptive text only as fallback.
• Hampton Roads relevance is scored from the stated place of performance and installation evidence (Norfolk, Virginia Beach, Chesapeake, Portsmouth, Newport News, Hampton, Suffolk, and the region's bases and shipyards).
• Duplicate notices across queries are merged; amendments supersede older versions while the change history is kept.

Scoring (paid report)

• Scores are bounded, rule-based components — geographic relevance, trade fit, accessibility, qualification burden, timing, and prime-vs-subcontract feasibility. No opaque model judgment sets a recommendation.
• Every pursue / partner / watch / skip call ships with its reasons. If you disagree with a reason, you can see exactly which signal produced it.

What we refuse to do

• No invented numbers. Contract values, incumbents, and win odds are not asserted unless the source states them. Absence is reported as absence.
• No private data. Public notices only.
• Public/paid boundary is enforced by software. The public site is generated from a whitelisted projection of the data, and an automated fail-closed check blocks publication if paid-tier analysis ever appears in public output.

Update cycle

Reviewed and updated twice weekly on Tuesdays and Fridays. Tuesday is the Weekly Intelligence Brief. Friday is the Friday Opportunity Update; if no material source-backed changes are found, the Friday edition says that plainly instead of repeating Tuesday content as new.

Limitations, honestly

• Federal (SAM.gov) coverage only for now — state (eVA) and city procurement portals don't expose comparable public endpoints and are not yet included.
• Burden and timeline signals are extracted from public notice text and can be incomplete; always verify against the official solicitation documents before bidding.