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

The scan runs weekly; the snapshot on this site and the paid report are generated from the same run, so free and paid tiers always describe the same week. Each weekly snapshot is archived, dated, and left unchanged.

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.

Read this week's snapshot