Adding a station got easier: new pages for the aircraft and ships networks
The pages at /adsb and /ais used to be long. They had everything a new volunteer needed, but it sat in paragraphs, and the command you had to copy was somewhere in the middle. People who arrived from a forum post with a working receiver had to read a lot before they knew what to do.
Both pages now start with the same short answer: what the network is, what your station gets, and a button to add it. Under that sit the live numbers (receivers online right now, aircraft heard in the last 24 hours, ships heard in the last 30 days, countries), and then four numbered steps:
- Get a receiver. If you already run readsb, dump1090, ultrafeeder or AIS-catcher, you have one. A Mac with our free app works too.
- Get your station ID. Sign in on /feed with Google and press Connect a receiver. The ships page sends you there with Ships already picked.
- Add one line. The exact line sits in the step with a copy button. For ADS-B it goes next to the aggregators you already feed, so FlightRadar24, ADS-B Exchange and adsb.lol keep getting your data.
- Check that it arrives. The address check is right under the steps. Press it from the same network as your receiver and it tells you whether your stream reaches us. If you already feed us through adsb.im, it finds that stream and lets you claim it, history included.
After the steps come what a station earns (a public page, a place on the station leaderboard, Feathers every day, a Founding badge while places are open), the maps of the network, the top stations and a list of questions with short answers.
Less waiting, fewer surprises
The page used to appear in pieces while numbers loaded. Now the first frame already carries the words and the numbers the server knew when it answered. When fresh numbers arrive, they count up in place instead of popping in. If something is still on its way you see a soft placeholder in the shape of what is coming, not a blank gap. A number we could not measure is left out rather than shown as zero, because "0 receivers online" on a page like this reads as a dead network.
For search engines and assistants
Everything you read on these pages is written once on the server and comes in the page itself, in all twelve languages. The page also carries the four steps as structured how-to data, the questions as an FAQ and a breadcrumb trail. The same text is available as JSON at /api/public/adsb/hub and /api/public/ais/hub, and both pages are listed in our llms.txt. If an assistant gets asked how to feed a ship receiver into Skydex, it should find the four steps.
If something on either page is unclear, tell us in Discord. A volunteer who gets stuck at step three is the most useful feedback these pages can get.