SKYDEX.online Feeder Network

Feed the sky
from your Mac.

Skydex Feeder is a native menu bar app that turns an RTL-SDR stick into an ADS-B feeder. Decoder bundled, two-minute setup. No terminal, no Docker, no Raspberry Pi. Feeding from a Mac used to mean homebrew and config files; now it's an app.

Download for macOS 🗺 Live coverage map Version 0.1.4 · 8 August 2026 · what’s new
Free · macOS 13+ · Apple silicon & Intel · notarized

Two minutes, three steps

  1. Plug an RTL-SDR stick into your Mac. Any RTL2832U stick works: an RTL-SDR v3, an AirNav RadarBox FlightStick, the blue FlightAware Pro Stick Plus, a generic DVB-T dongle. With a 1090 MHz antenna by the window you're a complete station for about $30.
  2. Open Skydex Feeder. The wizard finds your stick, asks for your location (or takes it from macOS Location Services), and starts the bundled decoder. No drivers, no terminal.
  3. Watch the menu bar icon turn green: “Feeding · N aircraft · M msg/s”. Paste your station key from skydex.online/feed to claim your station — badge, founding slot and feeder perks attach to your Skydex profile.

💬 Stuck at any step? Ask in Discord — #feeders — a human answers.

Why this exists

🖥

The Mac was always left out

Every feeder guide starts with "get a Raspberry Pi". If you had a Mac and a stick, the answer was homebrew, dump1090 flags and a terminal window that had to stay open. We think plugging in a USB stick should be enough.

📦

Decoder bundled

The app supervises a bundled build of readsb — the same decoder the whole ADS-B community runs. It starts it, watches it, restarts it after sleep or USB re-plugs, and shows per-network health. You never see a process.

🤝

Non-exclusive, by design

Your antenna is yours. The app feeds Skydex and is built to feed everyone else in parallel — community networks via a switch in Settings, FR24/FlightAware feeders via a local beast port. Skydex has a switch of its own too. No lock-in, ever.

Feeds Skydex — and anyone else

Multi-feeding is the norm in this hobby and the app treats it as a feature, not a threat:

  1. Community networks (adsb.lol, airplanes.live, adsb.fi, ADSBexchange…): flip a switch in Settings ▸ “Also feed other networks”, paste or generate a feeder UUID, done. Anything else that accepts a beast stream goes in through “Add custom…”.
  2. FR24 / FlightAware / PlaneFinder: the app always exposes a local beast port 30005, so their feeder clients read from Skydex Feeder like from any receiver. None of the three ship a macOS client, so that client runs in Docker on the same Mac — see the FAQ below for the exact snippet.
  3. Your own tools: the same port feeds tar1090, virtual radar software, anything that speaks beast.

What’s new in 0.1.4

  1. Fixed: a healthy feed could report “Decoder keeps crashing”. The app started a second decoder a moment after the first, and the loser died on a port clash while the winner kept feeding perfectly. Nothing was actually wrong with the feed — but the icon went red and the retry counter climbed. If 0.1.3 looked broken to you, this is why.
  2. Skydex has an off switch in Settings. Until now the other networks had toggles while ours was a flag in a config file — backwards for an app whose point is that it doesn’t lock your stick to us. Turning it off keeps every other network feeding; the menu bar icon just can’t go green, since green means the Skydex connector is healthy.
  3. Corrected licence notice. The licence README inside 0.1.1 labelled the bundled readsb BSD-3-Clause; it is GPL-3.0-or-later, and the combined decoder executable is GPL-3.0. The text shipped in the app now says so.
  4. Straighter links to the other networks. Their “how to feed” pages walk you through installing their Linux feeder client, which you don’t need — this app already sends the same stream to the same port. The links now point at the page that’s useful once data is flowing.
  5. Other networks without a text editor. Settings ▸ “Also feed other networks”: toggles for adsb.lol, airplanes.live, adsb.fi and ADSBexchange, a feeder UUID with a Generate button, and “Add custom…” for anything else that speaks beast. (new in 0.1.1)
  6. Station key field. The UUID from “Connect a receiver” now has a home in Settings and in the wizard — paste the bare key or the whole connector line, either works. Without it the network heard your aircraft but couldn’t credit them to you.
  7. Fixed: the wizard could hang on “Use My Location”. macOS was silently refusing to show the permission prompt; the spinner span forever. It now asks properly, and gives up with an explanation instead of spinning if anything else goes wrong.
  8. “Open Skydex Live Map” in the menu now opens the coverage map, not the game — what you want from that item is whether your own antenna is showing up.

Full version history →

FAQ

Is it really free? What's the catch?

Free, no tiers, no accounts required to feed other networks. The deal is the same as the whole feeder network: your data powers Skydex, a flight game where players catch real aircraft — and feeders get in-game perks for it. Connector and config features are free-tier by policy and will stay that way.

Why is Skydex on by default?

Because this app is how our network gets stations — that’s the honest deal, and we’d rather state it than hide it. You download a free feeder app built by Skydex; out of the box it feeds Skydex. It’s the same logic as fr24feed feeding FR24.

What it’s not: a lock, or a data grab. Skydex sits in the network list like everyone else, with its own off switch — no account, no tiers, nothing breaks when you flip it. If you use this app purely to feed adsb.lol from a Mac and never send us a byte, that’s a fine outcome: there was no decent way to do even that on macOS before.

And on the “what happens to my data” question behind this one: your feed becomes live gameplay — players catching real aircraft — not a product on a sales sheet. We never resell your raw feed. Same terms as the whole feeder network.

Is it open source?

The app itself is closed-source — its codebase seeds our upcoming mobile app. The decoder inside is bone-stock readsb (GPL), and its sources plus our exact build scripts are public in the releases repo, as the license requires. The app is notarized by Apple and the FAQ entry below lists exactly what leaves your Mac.

What data leaves my Mac?

The ADS-B messages your stick receives (the same compact beast_reduce_plus stream all community aggregators use), tagged with your station key, sent to feed.skydex.online:30004 — plus whatever other networks you enable. No screen contents, no files, no telemetry. Diagnostics you copy manually redact your station key and round your coordinates.

macOS says the app is from the internet — is it safe?

The DMG is signed with an Apple Developer ID and notarized by Apple, so Gatekeeper opens it with a standard first-launch prompt — no right-click tricks needed. If you ever see a stronger warning, you're not holding our build: download only from this page.

Which sticks and antennas work?

Any RTL2832U-based SDR stick. Purpose-built sticks with a built-in 1090 MHz filter/LNA (FlightAware Pro Stick Plus, RTL-SDR v3 + filter) hear noticeably further. Any 1090 MHz antenna helps; even the small magnetic-base whip that ships with most sticks will see planes. For a neutral parts guide see the community ADS-B wiki.

Does my Mac need to stay awake?

Yes — v0.1 feeds while you're logged in and pauses when the Mac sleeps (the app recovers automatically on wake). A background daemon that feeds without a logged-in user is the headline feature of v0.2.

Can it feed FR24 or FlightAware too?

Yes — through Docker, and it's worth knowing why. Community networks (adsb.lol and friends) accept a raw beast stream, so the app feeds them itself: flip their toggle in Settings → “Also feed other networks”, no client involved. FR24, FlightAware and PlaneFinder accept no such stream — the only way into their networks is their own feeder client, and none of the three ships a macOS build. So that client runs in Docker Desktop on the same Mac and reads the already-decoded stream from Skydex Feeder over localhost:30005. FR24, for example:

docker run -d --name fr24feed --restart unless-stopped \
  -e BEASTHOST=host.docker.internal -e BEASTPORT=30005 \
  -e FR24KEY=your-sharing-key -p 8754:8754 \
  ghcr.io/sdr-enthusiasts/docker-flightradar24

No sharing key yet? One run of docker run -it --rm --entrypoint /usr/bin/fr24feed ghcr.io/sdr-enthusiasts/docker-flightradar24 --signup --configfile=/tmp/config.txt issues one. Skydex Feeder keeps the stick either way — their client never touches it. And if you already own a Raspberry Pi, feeding FR24 from there is simpler than keeping Docker running on the Mac.

I already have a Raspberry Pi station. Do I need this?

No — keep the Pi. This app is for the people who never got one: add the Skydex line to your existing ultrafeeder / adsb.im config instead.