Methodology & trust

How the Radar is built

The Radar answers one commercial question: which port and logistics developments deserve a Hampton Roads operator's attention this week? Everything below exists to make that answer checkable.

Implemented sources

• Port of Virginia public RSS feed, Schedule of Rates, and Port Reports pages.
• USACE Norfolk District public RSS feed.
• NOAA/NWS Virginia operational weather alerts.
• SAM.gov active Virginia opportunities filtered for port, marine, dredging, warehouse, logistics, pier, rail, and terminal terms.
• Virginia Beach commercial permits, when the public ArcGIS endpoint is available.

Rejected or deferred sources

• Virginia 511 traffic JSON was rejected because the checked endpoint returned an HTML app shell, not deterministic JSON.
• USCG Local Notices to Mariners PDF ingestion was deferred until stable discovery of the current document path can be automated.

Evidence and confidence

• Every public signal carries its public source link. Confidence labels reflect how directly the source supports the reading.
• No congestion index, dwell-time estimate, cargo volume, project value, customer impact, or contractor demand is invented. Absence is reported as absence.

Update cadence

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

Public/paid boundary

Public pages carry a sanitized projection: broad summaries with sources. Paid-grade detail — impact and urgency ranking, buyer matching, exact site detail, and action guidance — stays in the paid report, enforced by an automated fail-closed check before anything publishes.

Limitations, honestly

• Coverage is strongest for official port, federal, and procurement records; private terminal operations are outside the public record.
• Signals extracted from public text can be incomplete; verify against original documents before committing resources.
• Reports are commercial screening intelligence — not legal, procurement, financial, or investment advice.