The network on one map
There is a new page at skydex.online/adsb/live, the live network map. It draws the whole planet, and on it every aircraft the Skydex receivers can hear at this moment. While this was being written that was 982 of them, from 51 receivers in 10 countries, delivering just under 6000 messages a second.
We already had two maps on this band and neither could show that. tar1090 shows what is flying, and it does that better than anything we would write, but it measures everything from one configured point and knows nothing about who feeds it: a receiver in Melbourne is just more traffic on a plot centred on Hamburg. The coverage grid shows where the network has heard anything over 30 days, which is history rather than this second. The question neither of them answers is the one an operator and a curious volunteer both ask first, which is simply how far this thing reaches.
Seeing it drawn is a surprise even to us. There are dense knots over southern England, the Rhine, Switzerland and Finland, a chain across the United States from California to Florida, a bright patch over Osaka, another over Melbourne, a single receiver in Singapore and one deep in Brazil at Marabá. Twenty five ADS-B stations, five continents, and a shape you cannot get from a table of station names.
What the map says, and what it refuses to say
Three lines on this page are worth spelling out, because each is a promise we keep elsewhere and had to keep here too.
The receivers are drawn on their nearest city and never on their antenna. The public station API carries no coordinates at all, on purpose: the feeder page promises an exact position is never published. What a station does publish is its nearest city, which is off by tens of kilometres and has been on its own page since early September. That city is where the marker sits. A receiver whose owner never set a position is not on the map at all, and feeds the network exactly the same.
Private aircraft are on it, as grey outlines, carrying their class and nothing else. No hex, no registration, no callsign, because that is all the feed publishes about them. They are quieter than the identified traffic at every zoom, which is the same contact with less known about it.
The blue wash is the measured grid, and it belongs to the network rather than to any one antenna. Which receiver heard which square is not published, so the squares cannot be traced back to somebody's roof.
Built out of what was already there
No new API, no new collection, nothing new on the ingest. The page reads three endpoints that have been public for weeks and draws them. Even the basemap is reused: the coastlines come from the file the voxel world already ships, which is why a map of the entire planet opens at once instead of filling in tile by tile.
The sky refreshes every ten seconds. At world zoom an airliner moves well under a pixel in that time, so a faster poll would buy nothing and cost every viewer a sizeable payload three times a minute.
Every dot on it is somebody's receiver on somebody's roof. If yours is not there yet, connect it: any ADS-B receiver works, and a station that has been feeding us anonymously can be claimed with its own stream id.