Understand
What is ADS-B, and why is your neighbour listening? →
The radio messages behind the moving dots. No pilot licence, alphabet soup or expensive shopping list required to understand them.
The Skylark field guide to ADS-B
A little radio.
A much bigger sky.
Learn what aircraft are broadcasting, build a receiver, and make sense of the software that listens. The dongle is small. The rabbit hole is considerable.
13
practical guides
practical guides
16
software projects
software projects
09
feeding destinations
feeding destinations
05
receiver tools
receiver tools
Where are you starting?
No need to read the whole internet first.
01 / I am curious
What are the aircraft saying?
Understand the messages, the receiver chain and why a map knows more than a single radio.
Start with ADS-B →02 / I have a receiver
Keep it. Get more from it.
Add useful software and new destinations without dismantling the station that already works.
Share your observations →03 / Something has broken
Find where the data stops.
Work through reception, decoding, the local map and the network. Leave the innocent parts alone.
Diagnose the problem →Find an answer.
Search guides, tools, projects and definitions.
Search happens on this device. No query is sent anywhere.
The collection.
Start with a question. Leave with a next step.
Start
Your first receiver, without the expensive detour →
Get one local aircraft onto one local map. Everything else comes after that.
Start
Buy for your site, not somebody else's range record →
A practical specification for the host, radio, antenna and cable. No affiliate ranking disguised as engineering.
Start
Pick one installation route →
ADSB.im, PiAware, containers or a native decoder. Four sensible routes, four different maintenance jobs.
Improve
The best upgrade may be moving the antenna →
Height, obstructions, cable and safe mounting. Why the view matters as much as the receiver.
Improve
Tune a receiver like an experiment →
Change one thing, keep a baseline, and resist the natural temptation to turn everything up.
Share
One receiver, several networks →
Share deliberately. Keep the working decoder, separate MLAT, and understand what each service receives.
Understand
MLAT: when the position is a calculation →
Several receivers hear the same message at slightly different times. That difference is useful.
Fix
Something has stopped. Start here. →
Find the first broken link. Do not reinstall the links that still work.
Understand
Read aircraft.json without fooling yourself →
Missing fields, mixed sources, altitude references and clocks. The details that make receiver data useful.
Operate
Keep the hobby. Keep the keys private. →
Receive-only equipment, network boundaries, location choices and the difference between public data and permission.
Operate
Make the receiver pleasantly boring →
A small maintenance routine that catches silent failures without turning a hobby into a second job.
Share
Add Skylark beside the receiver you already run →
Keep your existing decoder and feeds. Check the local file, keep the keys private, and verify acceptance.
Understand it by trying it.
Calculators with their assumptions left in.
Explore the horizon
Change receiver and aircraft height. See what geometry says, and what it cannot say about reception.
Try the horizon calculator →Inspect a snapshot
Find old positions, missing ages and mixed sources in aircraft.json. Your file stays in your browser.
Open the JSON inspector →Read a cable specification
Turn decibels into a power ratio without pretending that power and range are the same thing.
Calculate cable loss →The sources are part of the guide.
Named maintainers. Official feeding instructions. Original diagrams with honest labels. No invented hardware tests, no affiliate leaderboard, and no requirement to feed Skylark to use any of it.
Read the editorial policy and source register →