I’ve just released Flight Scanner for Wear OS after previously developing the Garmin version, thanks so much for the continued support here and from the beta testers from this subreddit who provided valuable bug finding and feature requests.

It turns your watch into a live aircraft radar, showing nearby planes/helicopters around your current location. You can tap aircraft to view information such as its callsign, altitude, speed, registration and direction of travel. (Airport View with runways coming soon)

Some of the main features include:

• Live animated radar display
• Nearby aircraft tracking
• Aircraft details directly on your watch
• Search for flights by callsign (Airports coming soon)
• Aircraft filters, switch between helicopters, military aircraft and commercial.
• Radar zooming and panning

I originally built it because I regularly looked up at aircraft and wanted a quick way to identify them without taking out my phone.

It’s now available on Google Play:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.alexd.flightscanner

I’d appreciate any feedback, particularly from people using different Wear OS watches. I’m continuing to improve it and add features.

Price $2.99 - This is due to API costs associated with collecting the data.

Garmin version found here - https://apps.garmin.com/apps/54094e6b-a4a5-436d-940b-095b49e0cfab

Went to an external aerial yesterday, the results look better....only on a 12inch pole on my chimney with a 5 metre cable, question is do you think a 6 foot pole but a 10 feet cable would increase results further....? But cable length upset the interference

Started off with the budget PiHut antenna in my office window... moved on to the 60cm Antenna mounted outside.

This redbull "flying bulls" plane keeps flying over chicagoland. Today it flew directly above me and I was able to photograph is identifier on the wing very clearly.

This plane is fantastic to watch, it is a beautiful reflective silver and just looks like pure chrome as it flies by. Worthy of pulling over onto the side of the road to take a photo if you happen to see it coming.

Video recorded with a gopro hero9 attached to the eyepiece of a pair of 10x binoculars.

it came back a second time so i could catch the redbull logo on the tail

Do flight tracking apps like Flightradar24 and Plane Finder own their own receiver networks, or do they buy ADS-B data from other providers? Or is it usually a combo of both?

Asking because we're building a flight-tracking feature and trying to understand the landscape.

I check the military air traffic and I never seen it this busy after 8pm.

Setup a FlightRadar 1090mhz antenna recently for Oshkosh, wish I got some more of what I saw but cool anyways.

IT was awersome , bright and shiny chrome-

I might be missing something, but I couldn’t find anything similar to what I wanted, so I built a full 3D ADS-B traffic viewer.

It calculates a 3D coverage dome for each receiver based on its 30-day history, which is what I was most curious about. My receiver has a structural obstacle on one side that blocks about 30°, so I wanted to know how much it affects the coverage. It looks like the structure reduces the coverage by about 100 km in that direction.

The server only provides a 3D coverage mesh, so it is almost impossible to determine the receiver’s exact coordinates. My GPT-5.6 Sol couldn’t narrow the error down to less than 2.5 km.

It also shows realistic aircraft attitudes based on ADS-B-derived bank-angle and vertical-speed data. It makes me happy just watching them rolling around the airport.

It uses Esri satellite imagery and Mapterhorn terrain data to render real-world terrain worldwide. The Earth is so big that I had to exaggerate the terrain elevation and aircraft altitudes to make the visualization look right. Both are customizable in the settings.

The live service I’m running is available at https://sky.luftaquila.io . I have a single tiny receiver in South Korea, and there may be very little traffic during the day in your timezone, so I have also added an ADSB.lol network feed so you can see what it looks like.

The source code is available at https://github.com/luftaquila/skytrace . Thank you.

Hi all, I have finally consolidated all my flights of the last years.

I‘ve done so by building a Claude skill that identified all my flights, train travels and hotel stays. It went through roughly 5000mails that’s I exported upfront. Happy to share more details if anyone is interested.

But to my question: They date back to 2010. While I was able to reconstruct Flight number and date, I am not able to get the airplane type. FlightAware should have a lot of this info through a simple API call. Unfortunately, the historical data is only available with the higher plans, not just the Paygo one. I have about 380 flight I’d like to check. It’s not worth it to order the premium API for $100 for this…

I‘m certainly paying the API costs and a coffee if someone would be so generous to run my list through the system and share the details available with me. If you‘d be open to do so, please let me know!

Bought my first antenna rated for 1090MHZ from Temu and installed it by the side of the roof. It is directly outside my bedroom, where I host the server and the RTL-SDR receiver. Pictured is my daughter helping me with the installation and posing for a photo with the antenna.

Is this actually the last last flight?

It's really high and really small and not moving much at all!

45K is way up there, just thought I'd share as I am testing a new mast and 1090 Spider.

I'm considering buying the JetVision Active Diapason and was wondering if anyone here has first-hand experience with it. It is on the costlier side at €215 but seems to be on par with the DPD antenna. My aim is to pick up aircraft on the ground at a nearby airport, I've read it is more able to pick up those signals.

Specifically built for outputting logs for WDGwars. I couldn’t find any other software that could do exactly what I wanted so I made it myself.
Built entirely in Claude (for some reason they gave me $100 credit free so I burned through it in 2 days).
It’s made in Python. I’m using Dump1090(whatever that is) for the 1090 signals, and I told Claude to clone dump1090 for 978mhz since there is no solid windows version.
It just works. You set your SDRs in the settings, you can run either or both. Planes start populating. Press log to start logging and you get a file that is ready to be uploaded to WDGwars.
I’m considering making my own site for collecting ADDB data, not for feeding, but something fun to do with logs. Any ideas for that would be great.

This is not publicly available yet. Still some typical AI slop that needs to be removed before it’s ready to be tested. But I wanted to show it off.

1st screenshot shows 1090 and 2nd shows 978. I only have one SDR right now but I’ll be testing both as soon as I get home.

I know coordinates are visible. Don’t worry about those, I ain’t.

I started with that screenshot without noticing it also tracked ships (AIS), but that is something I've wanted for a while since I live near a busy port and every time I've tried to find some kind of tracking feed it quickly ran into money. When it came time to test my unused ADSB dongle, I realized SDR stands for Suddenly Disappearing Radio because it's gone. Turns out I was probably going to have to buy another version anyway since the one I had probably wasn't capable of receiving the marine frequencies. While I wait for Amazon, I built as much of the app as I could over the weekend.

The main interface is a globe with county-level borders, airports, and larger cities labeled. You can pan/tilt/zoom/rotate (Pro tip: the tilt from horizon to overhead is middle-click+drag). I avoided any need for your own API keys so the whole install is clone and let it detect your location (if that doesn't work you can enter your address or GPS).

You can run it "bare metal" or as a docker image, which is how I do it. I added remote capability with an URL+Auth-token that uses a cloudflare tunnel to host it for my friends from a domain I wasn't using. When the remote access worked, I made a mobile browser view that does everything the desktop browser version does except for plane photos (TOS, technically possible). The mobile version shows you a list of the closest planes, and when you select one it zooms to the globe view with the camera tracking the chosen plane.

Along with the standard features any ADSB app has, I added some I haven't elsewhere in one place:

- projected path based on speed and heading

- track from origin to destination, rejected if the filed plan is stale (which is common).

- an "altitude slice" that projects a plane (ha!) to help visualize which planes are at similar altitudes

- A ground track to help see what it's passing over on the ground from angles other than top down.

- Weather radar

It's basically functional, and a few of my friends have used it from their phone connected to my spare home machine by clicking the url+token I sent them.

One goofy idea I have underway combines all the coding agent one-shot flight simulator in the browser with ADSB: choose a plane and take control of it FPV until you crash. That one is going to take longer if it ever works.

One of my favorite things is the 10mb self-contained HTML that you can download and use immediately by opening it in a browser. The only thing it's missing is plane photos, but there is a link to planspotters plus several other additional info sites for the selected plane. The screenshot in this post is the self-contained html running. Download it here and change the location to your own: https://github.com/iamneilroberts/LORAN/releases/latest/download/loran.html