Guides

ADS-B Guides

Step-by-step guides to building your own ADS-B receiver and getting more from real flight data.

A flow diagram: a home ADS-B receiver (a 1090 MHz antenna and a Raspberry Pi) sends one decoded feed into a feeder client, which fans out to the open community networks (adsb.lol, airplanes.live, adsb.fi, and the academic OpenSky Network) and to the for-profit networks (FlightAware and Flightradar24), showing that a single receiver can feed many networks at once without affecting its own local map.

How to Feed the Open ADS-B Networks

Your receiver hears a few hundred miles of sky. Feeding shares it with the public networks, turning one rooftop into a tile of a map that spans continents.

Updated June 23, 2026

A line-of-sight diagram: a rooftop ADS-B antenna and an airliner at 35,000 feet, each with a dashed line to its own radio horizon over the curved earth, meeting at roughly 237 miles (about 206 nautical miles), showing that range is set by line of sight and that the aircraft's altitude provides most of the horizon.

How to Extend Your ADS-B Range

Most ADS-B receivers hear a fraction of the range they could. The biggest fixes are free: antenna height and a clear horizon, then low-loss coax and a filter.

Updated June 23, 2026

A single instant of real ADS-B traffic over Greater Los Angeles at 5:45 PM: 232 aircraft, each a dot at its position trailing a fading line of its last 12 minutes of flight, colored by altitude from low near the airports (cyan) up to high-altitude cruise (orange and gold), over the lit Southern California coastline.

How to Build an ADS-B Receiver

Build your own radar of the sky overhead. A step-by-step guide to a home ADS-B receiver, from the parts list to a live map you serve yourself, in an afternoon.

Updated July 9, 2026

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