What flew over your city yesterday
Skydex hears a lot of sky. Volunteer receivers pick up thousands of aircraft a day and the AIS side follows ships along a growing stretch of coast. Most of that never reaches you unless you open the map at the right minute.
So there's now a short daily line in the bell about the place you care about most. Pick a home city and, once a day, you get something like this:
Yesterday over Hamburg: ✈ 412 · 🚢 37 · rarest: Antonov An-124 Ruslan, one of 2 the network heard in 30 days
Tap it and you take off over that city.
How it works
The line counts every aircraft and ship our network heard within 60 km of your city during the previous day (UTC). It's the same radius the city pages use for their live block, so the two agree on what "over the city" means.
The rarest type is only named when it actually was rare: ten airframes or fewer heard across the whole network in the last 30 days. A busy day of A320s and 737s gets no "rarest" at all. Calling routine traffic rare is exactly the mistake we fixed in the Discord channels last month, and we didn't want to repeat it here.
A few rules keep it from becoming noise:
- One line per day, at most.
- It arrives between 09:00 and 21:00 in your city's time zone, never at night.
- If you've already been on Skydex today, you don't get it. It's meant as a reason to come back, and you're already here.
- If you haven't been around for two weeks, it stops. A bell nobody opens just piles up.
- If the network heard nothing near your city, there's no line. "0 aircraft" every morning would teach you to ignore the bell.
Picking a city
New accounts see a city field on the welcome card, already filled with a guess from your rough location. You can change it or leave it empty. If you signed up before today, you'll get one bell row asking you to pick a city, and it links straight to the field on your missions page. We ask once and never again.
You can change the city at any time on the missions page or in the Exchange next to the banners. The same city also drives the weather banner on your profile. Its name is published only if you switched that on there.
Email comes later, and only if you ask
A weekly email version is planned. It will be strictly opt-in: you tick a box, we send a confirmation link, and nothing goes out until you click it. Every email will carry a one-click unsubscribe. That part waits until our mail setup is finished.
If your city has no receiver nearby, the line will often be empty and you won't get one. That's what the ADS-B network and the AIS network pages are for: a receiver on your roof fills that gap for you and for everyone else who calls that city home.