The Skydex Feeder Network is open — plug in your ADS-B receiver
Every aircraft you catch on Sky Radar is a real plane, and until today every look at the sky cost us a metered API request — which is why scans are capped. Today we open the long-term answer: the Skydex Feeder Network — our own aggregation network, fed by volunteers' antennas.
What it is
Thousands of aviation enthusiasts around the world run small ADS-B receivers — a Raspberry Pi, a €40 USB radio stick and an antenna by the window — and feed flight-tracking sites with what they hear. Those feeds are famously non-exclusive: one receiver typically feeds five or six networks at once, adding one line of configuration per network.
Skydex is now one of those destinations. Point your receiver at feed.skydex.online and your traffic joins our aggregate: the coverage map shows what the network sees, and game scans over your area are answered by real, volunteer-received data instead of a paid API.
How to join
Open /feed while signed in, register your receiver and you get a personal connector line — paste it into the additional Ultrafeeder arguments field of the adsb.im image (or your ultrafeeder config), restart, done. Your data starts flowing within a minute. No hardware yet? The whole station costs from about €75; the /feed page links a getting-started guide.
The terms are the community standard, in plain words: joining is free and voluntary, you keep feeding every other network in parallel, you can disconnect at any time, and we never publish your receiver's exact location. Your raw feed isn't resold — it powers the game, full stop.
What feeders get
The honest answer for today: a registered receiver, its traffic on the public coverage map, and our thanks. What's rolling out next is the real reward ladder — a feeder badge on your profile, and in-game premium perks earned by receiver uptime, the same way other networks thank their feeders with subscriptions. Early feeders lose nothing by joining before the perks land: uptime history counts from your first packet.
Why this matters for everyone else
Every receiver that joins makes the sky cheaper for the whole community. Scans served by our own network cost nothing, which is what will eventually let us raise scan caps and — in covered regions — put live aircraft into the simulator sky itself, something the metered API economics could never support. One antenna in the right city changes the game for every pilot flying there.
If you've ever wanted your own hardware to matter in a game: this is it. Your antenna, everyone's sky.