Skip to content
PiSky docs ← Back to pisky.space
Docs · 2 min read

Aircraft & ADS-B

Local decoding from an RTL-SDR or Mode-S Beast receiver — no internet required.

The primary flight source is always the receiver attached to the host Pi. PiSky does not need FlightAware, Flightradar24, an external flight API, or an internet connection to display locally received aircraft.

  1. Connect an RTL-SDR, Mode-S Beast GPS, or compatible receiver.
  2. Use PiSky Setup to select and configure the receiver — no service files to edit.
  3. The unified installer provides Bookworm's dump1090-mutability local decoder and a pinned build of FlightAware's beast-splitter for Mode-S Beast input. dump1090-fa and readsb are also detected automatically.
  4. Confirm the decoder is updating aircraft.json — PiSky checks the common dump1090-mutability, dump1090-fa, readsb and dump1090 paths under /run and /var/run.
  5. Open /admin/?page=flights to verify receiver status, range, targets and message counts.

Leave the stream format on Beast Classic unless the receiver is genuinely a Radarcape — the Radarcape modes request features a classic Mode-S Beast can't provide, and the receiver then delivers no data at all.

Coverage map & privacy

Placing targets on a map requires the station position, so when the coverage map is enabled the receiver latitude and longitude are included in the public flight JSON. Turn the coverage map off in PiSky Setup to withhold them — the radar scope then falls back to plain range-and-bearing plotting, which needs no coordinates.

Optional sharing

PiAware and fr24feed can both consume the same local decoder stream (Beast format, port 30005) if installed separately. PiSky only shows traffic decoded locally; it never calls either company's hosted flight-data APIs, and platform station identifiers are never published.