By Sandy Carrington, Chief Commercial Officer, Dataero
A few weeks ago I was on the apron at Grimbergen — south-westerly at 10, the kind of Saturday morning that makes a flight plan feel like a privilege — and I caught myself watching the small antenna someone has bolted to the roof of the clubhouse. Nothing dramatic. A vertical whip, a coaxial cable disappearing through a vent, a Raspberry Pi presumably blinking away inside.
That little setup is feeding the network I work on. And the person who built it is the reason any of this exists.
Right, then. Let me explain what I mean.
The infrastructure isn’t ours
Dataero’s network — the one you can watch live at radar.dataero.eu — isn’t owned by Dataero. We don’t have a fleet of corporate receivers on warehouse roofs. We don’t lease tower space from telcos. The aircraft tracks you see on the radar are stitched together from receivers run by people who happen to love aviation: a retired ATC supervisor in Liège; a flight instructor with a balcony in Lisbon; a software engineer in Warsaw who put up a colinear antenna last summer because she wanted to see what was overhead at three in the morning.
Each is a node. Together, they’re an airspace nobody owns and everybody sees.
That distinction is the reason I’m proud of this work. The receivers, the cables, the SMA connectors carefully waterproofed against winter rain — every piece of it was put there by someone who didn’t have to. They chose to. The network exists because aviation enthusiasts decided, individually and over years, that the thing was worth doing.
Why we need you, specifically
I’ve spent the better part of a decade marketing in aviation, and the most common thing operators get wrong about communities is treating them as a launch tactic. Build the product, then “build the community.” It almost never works.
ADSB doesn’t work that way. The data only exists because someone is listening. Coverage is a function of where the antennas are, not where a marketing plan would like them to be. A receiver on a Belgian rooftop covers what a receiver on a Belgian rooftop covers. There is no scaling shortcut, no “let’s just spin up more cloud capacity.” The signal comes down to earth, and earth is where you live.
So when we say aviation enthusiasts are essential to Dataero, we mean it in the most literal sense. Without you the network is a website with a map and no aircraft on it. With you, it is a piece of European airspace infrastructure, built and maintained by the people who actually care about what’s flying.
What “layering on top” really means
If you’ve fed ADSB data to one of the mainstream networks for years, the first thing to know about Dataero is that we’re not asking you to switch. Your existing setup keeps doing what it does. Dataero runs on top — you point a second feed at our endpoint, the same hardware you already own does the work, and your contribution shows up in our coverage map within minutes. No new Pi, no new antenna, no fresh cable run on a Saturday morning.
This matters because the most experienced feeders in Europe already have the best-located receivers. If we asked them to pick sides, we would lose. So we don’t. The community grows by addition, not subtraction.
The view from the left seat
There’s a second reason this work matters to me, and it’s harder to put on a pitch deck.
When I plan a flight from Grimbergen, I am — like any other private pilot — entirely dependent on infrastructure I did not build. The chart, the weather feed, the NOTAMs, the airspace boundaries, the traffic picture. Most of it is provided by institutions. A meaningful slice of it, increasingly, is provided by other pilots and enthusiasts who decided to share what they could see.
A community-built ADSB network is a quiet, civic thing. It says: I have a clear view of the sky, and I’d like that view to be useful to someone else. Multiply that by a few thousand rooftops across Europe, and you have something the incumbents cannot replicate by spending more money. Money buys data centres. It does not buy a balcony in Lisbon with a southern exposure and a person who’s prepared to climb up there in February to re-tape an antenna.
A small invitation
If you’ve never fed ADSB before and you have a rooftop or a balcony with a clear view of the sky, the technical onboarding is genuinely easy — easier than the documentation makes it look, in fairness. A Raspberry Pi 4 or 5, an RTL-SDR dongle, a small vertical antenna, and an afternoon. There are walkthroughs at radar.dataero.eu, and a community of people who have done it before and will answer questions in plain language.
If you already feed and you’d like to layer Dataero into your setup, the instructions are on the same site. Five minutes, and your node shows up on the European map.
And if you simply want to watch the network — to see what’s overhead at three in the morning, or to follow the traffic into Schiphol on a stormy afternoon — open the radar. That counts too. Watching is part of belonging.
Anyway. The clubhouse antenna at Grimbergen is still up there, doing its quiet work. Brothers in Arms on the kitchen speakers as I write this. Somewhere east of here, a node spun up this week is logging its first hours.
If you’re one of the people who put it there: thank you.
— Sandy