By Sandy Carrington, Chief Commercial Officer, Dataero
Every spotter knows the particular sting of the one that got away. The rare visitor that routed through your field on a Tuesday afternoon while you were three aisles deep in a supermarket. You hear about it the next morning, on a forum, from somebody who happened to be at the fence with a long lens and looked insufferably pleased about it. The aircraft was overhead for ninety seconds. The warning you got was none.
That gap — between something worth seeing being inbound and you knowing in time to be there — is the entire problem. So we built something for it.
Spotter is a new set of ADS-B flight tracking alerts inside the Dataero radar, made for the people who actually look up. The short version: tell it which field is yours, tell it which aircraft you care about, and it tells you when they’re coming.
Spotters are a pillar of this network. The least we can do is build them the tool they’ve been improvising with spreadsheets and group chats for years.
What Spotter actually does
You’ll find it after you sign in at radar.dataero.eu — Spotter sits in the menu, and you switch it on from your profile. Everything starts with a home airport. Type a few letters of an ICAO code or a name — EBBR, or Brussels — and pick your field. The rest hangs off that one choice.
Then build a watchlist. Up to five aircraft, by registration or hex — OO-SNA, or 44ce2b — the specific tails you’d cross a city for. When one of them turns up inbound to your field, you get a ping.
There’s a separate switch for the spotters whose interest runs to the grey tails. Alert me about any government or military movement, inbound or outbound, no tail number required. You don’t always know what’s coming. You just know you want to be there when it does.
Delivery is by email to begin with — one verified address — with WhatsApp and other channels on the way. And you decide what’s actually worth interrupting your afternoon for: inbound tail-number pings, diversion alerts, a morning digest of what the day might hold, or a lookahead you run on demand. One switch suspends the lot when you’re away, without losing any of your setup.
The feature I’m fond of is that lookahead. It’s a button that asks the only question a spotter ever really asks — anything good in the next two hours? Or six, if you’ve cleared the afternoon. It reads what’s inbound to your field and tells you whether it’s worth picking up the camera. No mystique. Just an honest answer to an honest question.
We’d rather you heard this from us: it’s a beta
Spotter is in active development, and two things follow from that.
The delivery channels are still being wired up, so an alert can arrive late, or not at all, while we finish the plumbing. Don’t bin your other habits just yet.
And the richest data source — filed flight plans from Eurocontrol — isn’t connected yet. Until it is, every alert, digest and lookahead is inferred from live ADS-B alone. Treat them as indicative, not gospel. A quiet lookahead doesn’t mean an empty sky; it means the network hasn’t heard anything inbound yet — which is a different thing entirely, and it brings me to the part that matters most.
ADS-B flight tracking alerts are only as good as the coverage
Here’s the bit no amount of software can fix. An alert can only fire if a receiver somewhere actually heard the aircraft. The lookahead over your field is exactly as good as the density of the network around it. Thin coverage gives you late pings, or none. Dense coverage gives you early ones, with time to get to the fence.
There is no cloud capacity that compensates for an antenna in the right place. Coverage is a function of where the people are.
So if Spotter is going to matter to you, the single most useful thing you can do is help the network hear better over the sky you care about. If you’ve already got a receiver running — a Pi, an SDR, an antenna with a clear horizon — you can point a feed at Dataero in a few minutes. The feeder is open source, MIT-licensed, and the whole thing lives on GitHub: github.com/dataero-adsb/dataero-adsb-feeder. Clone it, run the installer, paste in the API key from your profile, and walk away to let it run. It layers on top of whatever you’re already doing — you don’t switch anything off, and you don’t buy anything new.
The receivers feeding the radar aren’t ours. They sit on rooftops and windowsills Dataero will never see, run by people building coverage over their own patch of sky. Spotter is us trying to give something back to them: turning all that caught signal into a tap on the shoulder that says, now — go and look.
A small note
South-westerly at 10 over Brussels this afternoon, a steady procession into 25R, nothing rare but a good honest run of metal. I opened the lookahead anyway, out of habit. The useful kind.
If you spot, this one’s built for you. Tell us where it’s blind, where it’s slow, and what you’d want it to do next — that feedback is the difference between a tool we think is useful and one that actually is.
— Sandy