Feeder Network
Your antenna,
everyone's sky and sea.
Skydex is a browser flight game. Players catch real aircraft with a radar scan and fly over real ships, and every one of them was heard by a volunteer receiver. We take both: ADS-B on 1090 MHz and AIS on 162 MHz. Add one line to your config and your station powers the game over your city.
ultrafeeder / adsb.im → extra aggregator line:
AIS-catcher, or plain NMEA from any other decoder:
An ADS-B receiver does not hear ships and an AIS receiver does not hear aircraft: different band, different antenna, different decoder. One site with both antennas registers twice, once per band.
No ship receiver is feeding yet. The water side of the network opened in September 2026, so the first AIS antenna to arrive is the whole coverage there is. Be it →
No coverage over your city on the aircraft map or the ships map yet? That's not a gap, that's your slot. You'd be the first station there, and the first 20 feeding stations get permanent founding-feeder credit whichever band they feed.
Why feed Skydex?
Your data becomes gameplay
Not another tracking website. When a player scans the sky over your coverage, the aircraft they catch, collect and show off came from your antenna. Ships work the same way: a hull your AIS antenna hears is a hull pilots fly over and spotters collect. You can literally watch people play with your data.
Non-exclusive, like all community feeds
Keep feeding FR24, FlightAware, adsb.lol and airplanes.live in parallel, or on the water aiscatcher.org, AISHub and MarineTraffic. Multi-feeding is the norm and we ask nobody to stop. Skydex is one more line in your config, on either band.
Perks, not promises
Networks thank feeders with subscriptions; we thank feeders with the game — feeder badge, premium perks for uptime, unlimited scans under your own sky. The badge is live today. Uptime we only started measuring in August 2026, so the clock starts on the same day for everyone — whether your station went up last week or in May.
Who is feeding right now
Every receiver that delivers packets gets its own page: uptime, streak of unbroken days, what it delivered, under an address its owner chooses. The two bands are ranked separately, because an antenna is only ever compared with antennas doing the same job.
| Station | Status | Streak | Uptime 30d |
|---|
| Station | Status | Streak | Uptime 30d |
|---|
How to join — three minutes
Pick the band your hardware actually hears. A site with both antennas does both lists, as two registrations, and gets two station pages.
🖥 On a Mac? Skip the Pi. The native Skydex Feeder app turns your Mac plus an RTL-SDR stick into a station in two minutes. Menu bar app, decoder bundled, no terminal.
- Have a receiver running adsb.im, ultrafeeder or plain readsb. Starting from zero? A Raspberry Pi, a ~€40 SDR stick and an antenna by the window is a complete station, or a Mac with our app.
- Sign in at skydex.online/feed (free, Google), hit Connect a receiver and pick Aircraft (ADS-B). You get a personal connector line with your uuid.
-
Paste it where your feeder keeps extra aggregators. On adsb.im that is
Setup → Expert → “Add additional Ultrafeeder arguments”, where
the line must end with a semicolon; on plain ultrafeeder it goes into
ULTRAFEEDER_CONFIG. Restart the feeder — your traffic shows on the raw tar1090 map within a minute.
An antenna for 162 MHz and an RTL-SDR is enough, and so is an AIS receiver you already run on a boat or a roof. This is not the same thing as an ADS-B receiver: different band, different antenna, different decoder.
- Run AIS-catcher, rtl-ais, AISrec, OpenCPN or any hardware receiver that can put NMEA on the network.
- Sign in at skydex.online/feed, hit Connect a receiver and pick Ships (AIS) as its band. You get a station id.
-
AIS-catcher takes it natively:
-H https://<your-station-id>@skydex.online/api/ais/feed gzip on interval 15 RESPONSE off. Any other decoder can send plain AIVDM sentences tofeed.skydex.online:10110/udp, no account needed. Put a tag block\s:<your-station-id>\in front of a sentence and the traffic is credited to your station instead of arriving anonymously.
📡 Already pointed an ADS-B receiver at us? Open skydex.online/feed from the same network and hit Check my address. It says whether your data is arriving right now, and whether it carries a station id or lands anonymously (helping the network, credited to nobody).
💬 Questions, or your feed isn't showing? Ask in Discord — #feeders — a human answers. Quick self-checks are in the FAQ below.
What feeders get
| You do | You get |
|---|---|
| First packets received | 📡 Feeder badge on your Skydex profile — appears automatically once your first packets arrive LIVE |
| Your receiver keeps running | Its own page on Skydex — uptime, streak of unbroken days, what it heard, under an address you choose, and a place on its own band's ladder: the station leaderboard LIVE |
| Your box dies at 3 a.m. | We tell you. Twelve hours of silence and the owner gets a notification — and another when it comes back LIVE |
| Receiver online most of the month | Premium in-game perks — extra radar scans and extra hangar refreshes (live "where is my caught aircraft now" position checks). Uptime is measured from August 2026, so the clock starts on the same day for every station MEASURING NOW |
| Always | Unlimited radar scans in your own coverage — it's your data. Ships were never scan-limited: the water your AIS antenna hears is simply on the map, for everyone, the minute it arrives |
| Always | Your station listed in the network — and the first 20 stations that feed become Founding Feeders, with permanent credit on this page. Either band counts |
The deal, in plain words
- Free, voluntary, revocable. Remove the line, and you're out — no questions.
- Non-exclusive. We encourage feeding other networks in parallel.
- You grant a non-exclusive right to use your receiver's data in Skydex products (game, public pages, API).
- We never resell your raw feed. It powers the game, full stop.
- Your exact location is never published — coverage maps use rounded positions only.
- ADS-B and AIS are open broadcasts. Reception is legal in the EU, US and most countries; you're responsible for your own jurisdiction.
- Private craft stay private. Recreational vessels are never classified and never stored, so they cross the map and leave no record. The same line has always applied to private aircraft.
Long version, with what we store and what we never publish: feeder privacy & data licence.
FAQ
ADS-B feed connected but nothing on the map?
In order: (1) give it a minute — the map refreshes fast, but your
feeder may batch its first packets; (2) check the connector line is
exactly adsb,feed.skydex.online,30004,beast_reduce_plus_out,uuid=<your-uuid>
— the format must be beast_reduce_plus_out, not plain beast,
and on adsb.im the line needs a trailing semicolon;
(3) make sure outbound TCP 30004 isn't blocked by your
router/firewall; (4) restart the feeder container/service after any
config change. Still dark? Ask
in Discord — #feeders with your rough location (never post the
uuid publicly) and we'll look from our side.
AIS feed sending but no ships?
In order: (1) if you use AIS-catcher's -H door, the
station id in the URL has to be the one /feed
issued for a receiver registered on the Ships (AIS) band, since
an aircraft station id is rejected on purpose (otherwise your hulls
would land in the aircraft ladder); (2) on the UDP door, check outbound
10110/udp is open and that the sentences are plain AIVDM with a
valid checksum, since a corrupted sentence decodes into a plausible
wrong ship and we drop it rather than guess; (3) UDP carries no
identity, so without the \s:<your-station-id>\ tag
block the data arrives anonymously: it still reaches the map, it just
credits nobody. Still nothing?
Ask in Discord — #feeders.
Can my ADS-B receiver feed ships too?
No. Aircraft transmit on 1090 MHz and ships on 162 MHz: different antenna, different decoder, and no amount of config makes one hear the other. A site that runs both antennas registers twice, one station per band, and each gets its own page, its own uptime and its own ladder position. The same SDR stick can often do the second job with a second antenna.
I already feed five networks. Why one more?
Because this one is a game. Aggregators show your data on a map; Skydex turns it into someone's collection card, a world-first catch, a kid's first spotted A380, a ship a pilot flies down to look at. Zero extra hardware, one line of config.
Do you want me to stop feeding aiscatcher.org or AISHub?
No, and please don't. AIS-catcher's own hub takes a separate flag and the two run side by side, exactly like multi-feeding on the aircraft side. If you feed AISHub, you also get a key to their data back — that's between you and them, and worth doing whether or not you feed us. We ask for one more output, never for an exclusive one.
What exactly do you receive from me?
From an ADS-B station, a standard beast_reduce_plus
stream — the same compact format community aggregators use. From an
AIS station, either AIS-catcher's decoded JSON or raw AIVDM sentences.
No access to your device, no telemetry beyond the messages themselves,
and your antenna's exact position is never published: a station page
names its country and the nearest city, nothing finer.
Does MLAT work?
Not yet — the MLAT server comes once several receivers overlap in one region. ADS-B positions don't need it.
I don't have a receiver. Where do I start?
For aircraft: Raspberry Pi + an SDR stick with a built-in 1090 MHz filter (~€40) + any 1090 antenna, flashed with the free adsb.im image. From parts to first planes is under an hour, and the same station can feed every other network too. For a neutral, no-affiliate parts guide see the community ADS-B wiki. For ships: the same class of SDR stick with a VHF antenna and AIS-catcher, or the AIS receiver already on your boat. Coastal reception is line of sight, so a window facing the water beats a better antenna facing inland.