Hamburg's sky is now live in the sim, 24/7 — powered by station №1
A day after we switched the live sky on, we spent a week flying under it, and it shows. Here is where it landed: the sky over Hamburg is now live around the clock, fed by station №1 of the Skydex Feeder Network — one receiver, one antenna, one windowsill. Every aircraft that station hears is in the simulator at its real position, altitude and attitude, twenty-four hours a day, because the data is our own and polling it costs nothing.
What "live" means after this week
The whole footprint, not a bubble. The first version only drew aircraft within 28 km of you, while a single station hears cruise traffic a hundred kilometres out — so the map was full and the sky felt empty. The layer now draws the receiver's entire footprint, out to 140 km. What the map shows, the sky shows. Distant contacts appear as constant-size radar dots; close ones are true-scale models with real published dimensions per type — an A380 is an eighty-metre giant, a Cessna is a speck, a police EC135 is exactly the twelve-metre machine that just crossed your nose.
Tags on everything, with the distance written on them. Every contact beyond nine kilometres carries a compact tag — callsign, flight level, and how far away it is — which fades with distance until it dissolves entirely at 100 km. Near traffic speaks, far traffic whispers, the horizon stays readable.
Photos on the plates — and on the map. Get within nine kilometres and the full data plate now carries a real photograph — this exact tail when photographers have caught it, the type's portrait otherwise, with the photographer's credit on the image. Meet SunExpress TC-SRE over the Elbe and the plate shows you that actual aircraft. The same photo now also appears on the map's hover card: rest the cursor on any plane and you see who you are looking at before you tap.
Zoom that behaves like optics. The gull's and the drone's camera zoom now magnifies the plates together with the world — up to about 5.5× — and zooming onto a distant dot resolves it into its real airframe, the way a spotting scope would.
Private aircraft fly too, anonymously. We originally left them out; they are now drawn as generic grey airframes with a plate that says exactly what the map already says — class, altitude, speed — and never who they are. No callsign, no registration, no history. The privacy line has not moved; the sky just got honest about how busy it is.
Why station №1 matters
Because it proves the loop. Nobody pays for this data, nobody rations it, and the sky over a city switches on the day one person in it plugs in a receiver. Hamburg has one. Your city could be next — a Raspberry Pi works, and so does a Mac and a $30 USB stick. The whole ask is at feed.skydex.online: register a station, point the antenna out the window, and everyone who flies over your town sees what you hear.