Your station now sits closer to home

· network · stations · update

A receiver owner in Braunschweig wrote to us with a fair question. His two stations, one for aircraft and one for ships, showed up on the live globe and on the station pages as "near Hamburg". Hamburg is 150 km away. Hanover, the capital of his own state, is 56 km away, and Braunschweig itself is right there.

Why it happened

We never publish where an antenna actually is. The feeder page promises that, and it stays true. Instead a station page names the nearest city from a fixed list, so the place you see is a coarse area and not an address. That list held about 1,250 cities, mostly the largest ones on each continent. In northern Germany that meant Hamburg, Berlin and little else, so a station anywhere between them landed on one of the two.

What changed

The list now also includes every national capital and every first-level regional centre: state capitals, provincial seats, oblast centres. That adds about 2,500 places to the old list. The same places already appear as labels on our maps, so a station's place always matches a dot you can see.

Across the stations that have entered a position, none moved further away and a good number moved much closer:

The place is still a regional seat and never a small town or a street. If you would rather show nothing, leave the position empty on your station settings. A station without a position simply has no place on the map.

And on the maps, the square it sits in

A name is one thing, a dot on a map is another. A dot on Hanover for a station in Braunschweig still sits 56 km from where the ships and aircraft it hears are. That hid nothing, since anyone looking at the traffic around a receiver can see roughly where it is. It only made the map look wrong.

So the maps now draw a station on the 0.1° square its antenna sits in, about 11 by 7 km in central Europe. It is the same grid the coverage maps already use, including the coverage tab on each station page. The marker lands a few kilometres from the antenna, never on it, and the exact position is still never published. This applies to the live globe, the aircraft and ship live maps, and the share images they make.

The globe says what it is waiting for

The last change is on the live globe. It used to sit behind a grey placeholder until the first batch of aircraft arrived, and then everything appeared at once. Now the globe draws straight away, and a small panel on the left lists each layer that has not answered yet: coastlines, aircraft, vessels, stations, and Starlink when you switch it on. Rows disappear as the data lands. If a layer does not answer, its row says so and that we are retrying, instead of spinning forever. An empty planet now reads as "still loading" rather than "nothing is flying".

Aircraft and ships also load independently now, so a slow sky no longer holds back the water.

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