Skydex Feeder for Mac — feed the sky without a Raspberry Pi
Every guide to feeding ADS-B data starts the same way: get a Raspberry Pi. Flash an image, find an Ethernet cable, SSH in. It works — hundreds of thousands of stations run exactly like that — but it quietly filters out everyone who has a Mac on the desk, a $30 SDR stick in a drawer, and no appetite for a weekend of terminal windows.
So we built the thing we wanted to exist: Skydex Feeder, a native macOS menu bar app that does the whole job. Get it at feed.skydex.online/mac.
Two minutes, honestly
Plug in any RTL2832U stick — an RTL-SDR v3, a FlightAware FlightStick, a generic DVB-T dongle. Open the app. A three-step wizard detects the stick, asks where you are (or takes the answer from macOS Location Services), and starts feeding. The menu bar icon turns green and shows the only status line you need: Feeding · N aircraft · M msg/s.
There is no dump1090 to compile and no config to write. The app bundles readsb — the decoder the whole ADS-B community runs — and supervises it: starts it, restarts it after sleep or a USB re-plug, and tells you in plain words when another program is holding the stick. The decoder's sources and our exact build scripts are public, as its license requires.
Non-exclusive, like everything we do
Your antenna is yours. The app feeds Skydex first, and it is built to feed everyone else at the same time. Settings has an "Also feed other networks" section: switch on adsb.lol, airplanes.live, adsb.fi or ADSBexchange, paste or generate the feeder UUID they identify you by, and add anything else that speaks beast through "Add custom…". FR24 or FlightAware feeder clients on the same Mac read from the app's local beast port like from any receiver. Multi-feeding is the norm in this hobby; a feeder app that tries to lock you in would deserve the distrust it got.
Why we care
Skydex is a flight game where players catch real aircraft with a radar scan — and every catch is heard by a real receiver. More stations mean more sky where scans cost us nothing and lag nobody. Feeders get the in-game side of the deal: the 📡 badge, unlimited scans under their own coverage, premium perks for uptime, and one of the twenty founding-feeder slots while they last.
If your Mac sleeps, the feed pauses and recovers on wake — a background daemon that feeds without a logged-in user is the headline feature of the next version. Requirements today: macOS 13+, Apple silicon or Intel, notarized DMG, free.
Have a Pi already? Keep it — one config line adds it to the network. Have a Mac and a stick? You're two minutes from your first plane.