Local ADS-B Receiver Support
Run an ADS-B receiver at home and your Mach 2 reads it directly over your own network, merging what your antenna hears into the Overhead Scanner — second by second, straight off the air.
Your antenna, on your display.
Plenty of Mach 2 owners already run a receiver at home — a PiAware, dump1090, tar1090, or readsb setup on a Raspberry Pi with an antenna in the attic or on the roof. Local ADS-B brings that feed onto your display: point the tracker at your receiver and the aircraft your own antenna hears get merged into the Overhead Scanner, alongside everything the cloud already sends.
It is an addition, not a replacement. The Overhead Scanner keeps working exactly as it does now — the local feed layers on top of it.
Second by second.
Your own antenna hears aircraft directly, so position, altitude, speed, and heading update as fast as the aircraft broadcast them — no round trip through anyone's network in between.
Aircraft only your roof hears.
A rooftop antenna picks up traffic a wide network can miss — light general-aviation aircraft and low flyers close to home that never make it into the shared picture. If your antenna hears it, your display can show it.
You keep the polish.
Raw receiver data is just numbers. Route and airline labels still come from our own route engine, so each aircraft gets your local telemetry and the cloud's context merged together — more detail without losing the finished look.
A receiver you probably already have.
There is no special hardware requirement and nothing to solder. If you can open your receiver's map in a browser on your phone, your Mach 2 will be able to read it too.
Any receiver serving the standard aircraft feed. PiAware, dump1090, tar1090, readsb — whatever you already run. It needs to be on the same home network as your Mach 2, at a private address on that network. Receivers exposed to the public internet are not supported and are rejected outright.
Or the self-contained ADS-B Kit. Don't own a tracker yet — or don't want to build a receiver? The ADS-B Kit is a complete FlightTracker LED with its own plug-and-play receiver in the box, so the whole thing works out of one unboxing. See the ADS-B Kit →
How to turn it on
Once the firmware update has reached your box, the whole setup is one screen in the owner portal.
- Sign in to your owner portal. Go to settings.flighttrackerled.com from any device.
- Open your device. Pick the Mach 2 you want to change, the same place you set your coverage area and brightness.
- Find Local ADS-B and switch it on. It ships switched off. Nothing happens until you turn it on yourself.
- Paste your receiver's address. The same address you use in your browser — for example http://10.0.0.221/skyaware/. Include the full path, not just the IP.
- Watch the health card. The portal shows whether the receiver is reachable, how many aircraft are in view, and how fresh the data is, so you can confirm it is receiving before you walk away.
If the tracker cannot reach your receiver
Your router may be isolating them from each other. This is the most common one, and it is not a fault in either device. Many home routers and consumer security suites quarantine new devices so they cannot talk to anything else on the network. If the receiver's address loads fine on your phone but the tracker still cannot reach it, open your router or security app and allow — or trust — the tracker. Then check the health card again.
Use the exact address that works in your browser. Copy it from the address bar, including the path, and paste the whole thing. A bare IP address will not reach a receiver whose page lives under a path.
Keep them on the same network. A guest network, a separate IoT network, or a second access point on a different subnet will usually block the connection by design. Put both on the same one.
Give the health card a moment. After saving, the tracker has to reach the receiver and read a first result before the card can tell you anything useful.
Provider-independent by design.
Local ADS-B is a feature today, but it changes the architecture. Everything below is direction, not a promise with a date.
Fully API-provider independent overhead data. With a receiver attached, aircraft positions come off your own antenna — not from any third-party API. Provider rate limits, provider outages, and provider coverage gaps stop applying to your overhead traffic. Your antenna also hears what wide networks miss: light general-aviation aircraft and low flyers close to home. (Routes and airline names still come from our own route engine.)
Resilience when the internet isn't there. The receiver-to-display path is your own network only — it never crosses the internet. That's the foundation for a display that keeps painting overhead traffic even when your connection is having a bad day.
Feeding the community network. The self-contained ADS-B Kit is built in partnership with the airplanes.live community network. A planned opt-in will let your kit feed that network — the same class of community receiver that powers hobbyist flight tracking everywhere.
Richer detail from your own signal. Your receiver knows things a network feed never sends — signal strength per aircraft, message rate, antenna range. That's raw material for future scenes: a range view of your antenna's reach, a "furthest catch" record.
What your antenna hears stays yours.
This feature was built to add detail to your display without turning your roof into somebody else's data source. Here is exactly what does and does not happen.
Nothing your antenna hears is uploaded unless you opt in. The aircraft your receiver picks up are read and drawn on the box itself. By default the only thing that goes up is a small health summary — whether the receiver is reachable, how many aircraft are in view, and how fresh the data is — so the portal can show you that card. There is exactly one exception, and it is yours to grant: a separate route-sharing setting, off by default, that lets the box report route observations to improve route lookups.
The tracker talks to your receiver directly. Over your own network, box to receiver. Your feed is not proxied through the internet, and your receiver never has to be exposed to the internet — it must be at a private address on your own network, and a public address is rejected outright.
Only an address you type in is saved. Anything the box finds on its own is used locally and never sent anywhere. The address you deliberately enter is stored with the rest of your device settings — like your home coordinates or your airport code — so your tracker knows where to look. Treat it as configuration, not a secret.
It is off unless you turn it on. Local ADS-B ships switched off. If you do not run a receiver, or you would rather not use one, nothing about your display changes and nothing extra runs on your network.