Life list
Which airframes has my own antenna heard?
A collection kept from direct reception only. Records that arrive from an aggregate feed are archived, but they never count here — the entry is the receiver's, or it is nothing.
Building
1090 MHz ADS-B · 978 MHz UAT · Aggregate feeds
An observatory for
An observatory for
everything overhead.
Skywatch listens for the position reports aircraft broadcast in the clear, keeps every one it receives, and lets you replay any day it has recorded. Aggregate feeds supply the coverage; a dual-band receiver at home adds what it can hear directly.
- Bands
- 1090 · 978
- Archive
- Raw, replayable
- Access
- Private
Station status
- Airframes recorded
- —Nothing ingested yet
- Heard today
- —Pipeline not running
- Archive span
- —No days on record
- Last observation
- —Never
The station is built but not yet listening. These readouts stay blank until the ingest pipeline runs for the first time.
Three views on one archive
What you can ask it
One pipeline underneath, three ways to read it. They differ by whose receiver the record came from and what question is being asked.
Observatory
What has been received, and can I replay it?
Every observation from every source, stored raw and partitioned by day. Read models are rebuilt from this archive, so a decoding mistake is a replay rather than a permanent loss.
BuildingFamily view
Where is my person?
Plain-language status for a pilot's circle. Deferred until the consent and the wording are right: a coverage gap has to read as "no data", never as bad news.
Deferred
Known limits
What it does not promise
Skywatch observes flights. What it has no way to guarantee is that it saw all of them — so here is exactly where the holes are.
- No uptime guarantee
- The aggregate feeds publish their own terms plainly: no SLA, no uptime guarantee. When a feed stops, this station stops receiving, and there is no fallback obligation.
- Aircraft can be invisible
- An aircraft with its transponder off broadcasts nothing. Aircraft on privacy programs are filtered upstream before this station ever sees them.
- Geography
- Reception depends on a receiver being within line of sight. Ocean and remote terrain are covered thinly or not at all.
- Not ATC flight following
- No controllers are involved and nothing here is provided to anyone in the air. This is a receiver on the ground, listening.
- Unattended
- Nobody is on call for it. It is one person's project, and it can be broken for a weekend without anyone noticing.
An aircraft missing from Skywatch means "no data" — never "not flying." Silence here is the most likely thing to be misread, and it carries no information about an aircraft's safety. Do not make a decision that matters based on what this station does or does not show. Emergency transponder codes are displayed when they are received, because they are interesting to look at; they are never sent as alerts, and nothing here reaches anyone who could act on one.
Where the data comes from
Sources
Coverage comes from volunteer feeder networks. Their terms permit personal, non-commercial use, which is the whole posture of this project: nothing here is redistributed, re-served, or made public.
| Source | Role | Terms observed |
|---|---|---|
| airplanes.live | Primary | Non-commercial use. No SLA, no uptime guarantee. |
| adsb.fi · adsb.lol | Redundancy | Personal, non-commercial. adsb.fi attributed as required. |
| ADSBExchange | History | Free monthly archive only — never the live API. |
| FlightAware AeroAPI | Enrichment | Look-ups for our own records only. Never position polling. |
| Own receiver | Direct | Unrestricted — the station's own reception. The only source that scores the life list. |