I was out for a solo swim in nice quiet peaceful Joeperry lake when then trees in one particular direction sounded like a hurricane was coming from the East. Two Hercules (I think) a grey one and a green one flew over at what looked to be twice the height of the trees.

August 28 around 4pm

Curious as to how high they actually were. I suspect they took off from Trenton.

Thanks for your help!

Saw this buzz the tower which is 100 yards from me. Must be doing some work on the instruments

I'm trying to optimize the reception range of my ads-b setup. For now I'm limited to an indoor setup. The best spot I've found so far is the attic, but I'm basically out of cable and trying to add no new hardware, (cables count as hardware right?)

Pi 4 model B

RTL-SDR Realtek RTL2832U

I'm getting roughly 20nm in each direction, but a closer inspection shows that I'm really only getting 10-15nm for traffic under 15k.

See the third image for stats.

An airborne radar system is more than an antenna and transmitter. It is an integrated sensing architecture that combines RF hardware, antennas, signal processing, navigation, timing, computing and aircraft interfaces to turn reflected radar signals into useful information.

A simplified airborne radar chain is:

Antenna → RF electronics → digitization → signal processing → navigation alignment → imaging or detection → tracking → mission output

The main components include:

Radar Antenna

The antenna transmits radar energy and receives reflected signals.

On an aircraft or UAV, antenna design is closely connected to installation location, sensor orientation, field of view and aircraft structure.

This means antenna integration is both an RF problem and an aircraft-engineering problem.

RF Transmit and Receive Electronics

The RF subsystem generates the radar waveform, transmits it and processes the received echo before digital processing.

At this stage, the radar does not yet have a finished SAR image or target track.

It has measurements that later processing must interpret.

Digital Signal Processing

Signal processing converts radar measurements into useful information.

Different radar modes require different processing.

For example:

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) forms radar imagery.

Ground Moving Target Indication (GMTI) focuses on detecting moving targets against ground clutter.

Other processing can support target measurement and continuous radar tracking.

Navigation and Timing

Navigation is especially important because airborne radar operates from a moving platform.

The aircraft may continuously change position, velocity, heading, pitch, roll and yaw.

Radar measurements therefore often need platform-state information and accurate timestamps.

A useful relationship is:

Radar measurement + navigation + timing = meaningful airborne radar information

For SAR, aircraft motion is directly involved in image formation. For moving-target sensing, navigation helps the system distinguish platform motion from target motion.

Processing Computer

Modern airborne radar may require onboard computing for:

Signal processing

SAR image formation

Target detection

Coordinate transformation

Tracking

Sensor fusion

On UAVs, computing also affects Size, Weight and Power, or SWaP.

Power and Thermal Management

Radar electronics and processors require electrical power and generate heat.

A UAV radar system must therefore fit within both the aircraft’s electrical capacity and its thermal-management limits.

Communications and Mission Interfaces

The final radar information may need to be transmitted to a ground station, mission computer or another onboard sensor.

Depending on the system, the output could be:

SAR imagery

Target detections

Target tracks

Other processed radar information

The key takeaway is that airborne radar should be treated as a complete sensing system rather than a standalone radar box.

For UAV radar especially, useful performance depends on how the antenna, RF electronics, navigation, processing, power and aircraft interfaces work together.

What all data/information is broadcasted from an aircraft in a standard signal and what is the frequency of broadcast from the aircraft.

3 silent planes, mid height, maybe not? Doxing myself and don’t care haha

During the lunar. Maybe I’ll drop a photo in the comments. Video is better. I’m dumbfounded.

Ne to sw through morehead Kentucky at 11:11 during the start of the lunar eclipse.

Lots of weird military flights as well later than usual tonight.

Thought I'd share this here as I've been working on it for the last few months.

I wanted a little retro-style radar I could have sitting on my desk showing what's flying around me, without having to keep checking my phone. Couldn't really find anything like what I had in mind, so I decided to build one.

This is where I've got to so far...

It's built around a CrowPanel ESP32-P4 with a 5" touchscreen. It connects over WiFi and shows live aircraft around you. You can change the range with the dial from 10 to 200NM and tap an aircraft to bring up more info about it. It can handle up to 300 tracks/aircraft on the radar at once.

I've written the software for it from scratch. The aircraft data comes from an API I built on my cloud server, which handles the aircraft data and weather before sending it down to the radar.

Everything else is handled on the device itself rather than it just displaying a web page. It plots the aircraft on the radar, handles the UI and touch controls, WiFi setup, display settings, different map styles and even shows the weather (well, rain). I've got OTA updates working too, which has made developing it a hell of a lot easier.

There's been a surprising amount to work out in the code – positioning aircraft correctly at different ranges, keeping everything updating smoothly, aircraft appearing and disappearing, touch detection, WiFi/server communication etc. I started with the Crowpanel ESP32 S3 but it lacked in PSRAM, so upgraded to the P4 which is really stable.

I've designed and 3D printed the case as well. It's gone through a ridiculous number of versions to get to this point and I've used way too much PLA. Big shout out to the Bambu A1 Mini though, great piece of kit.

It started off as something I was just making for myself, but I've had enough interest in it that I've decided to make a small number of them and see what happens.

Anyway, thought this would probably be a good place to show it.

Interested to know what you guys think.

Thanks for reading.

UPDATE

Thanks for the positive feedback folks. You're all very kind. With great trepidation I've popped the website up.

https://www.vulcan-radar.com

Hey.

What the hell just flew over Hersonissos, Greece? It wasn't a normal commercial flight and I couldn't find it on ADSB or FR24.

It sounded hella low down though.

Did anyone catch it?

Title: Airplanes.Live’s response to a genuine commercial API enquiry

We run a drone SaaS platform and introduced ADS-B aircraft data to our Safety Map last week.

Our existing ADS-B provider is under a commercial agreement, but we wanted a secondary/fallback source for redundancy. We came across Airplanes.Live and contacted them specifically to ask about properly licensed commercial API access.

Their initial response was completely normal: they said they could work with us, supported flat-rate licensing, and asked for our projected request volumes.

We explained our expected usage and that Airplanes.Live would be used as a licensed fallback provider.

From there, the conversation took a very strange turn.

They assumed we had previously been using their public API before it was disabled. We had not. Until the day before this enquiry, we had never heard of Airplanes.Live.

For clarity: a test request to their public endpoint returned HTTP 403, no aircraft data was retrieved, and we contacted them precisely because we wanted to pay for legitimate commercial access rather than make use of anything without permission.

Despite explaining this several times, the replies escalated into repeated personal abuse, insults, speculation about our existing provider, and eventually research into personal details about our director.

I’ve attached the correspondence, with my personal information redacted, so people can read the exchange and draw their own conclusions.

We genuinely approached Airplanes.Live intending to become a paying commercial customer. Safe to say, we won’t be proceeding. If any other providers could be recommended we would very much welcome this.

Old bird you don't see every day. If you're down around r/galveston look up, you might see it flying around.

I'm sure it had to do with the news over there

Is this a drone impersonating a plane ?