About

Who am I?

Joël, HB9EYA. Aviation has always been there. Amateur radio came in 2009 with my licence, then in January 2011 with a membership card at HB9HI, l'Association des Radioamateurs de la Côte (Switzerland).

The two worlds came together in April 2016, when Flightradar24 provided the hardware to join its network of feeders. That is how I put an ADS-B listening station into service in western Switzerland, and this site was born to show what it has accumulated since: the full log, statistics, and my aviation collections.

An automation technician by training, I taught myself to code on water management systems, before making it my profession. Artificial intelligence has taken a place of its own in it, more than a tool, a real passion I explore both at work and outside of it.

I also love to travel. There is Barbados, a place particularly close to my heart, where I return whenever I can. And NASCAR, especially when I get the chance to see a race on site with my father.

The site

For a long time, this site ran on a patchwork of PHP and MySQL, pieced together as needs arose. It nearly ended up abandoned; what saved it was all those years of accumulated data, because such a logbook of the sky is not something you throw away. So it was rebuilt from the ground up in TypeScript, a typed and test-covered codebase, on a modern foundation meant to be simpler and safer. The content has not changed: the same flights picked up by the antenna, the same log kept since 2016; only the machinery that displays it was redone.

From antenna to screen

What you read here follows a precise path, from the captured signal to the page on your screen. Everything is in place today; only the live map is still being built.

1. 1CaptureThe antenna and receiver pick up aircraft messages on 1090 MHz and decode them, in the clear, on site.
2. 2KeepA program built for this station records every contact locally, first. It is designed to run for years unattended: an internet outage, a reboot, a power cut lose it nothing. Capture continues offline, and catch-up happens on its own when the network returns, never duplicating a contact.
3. 3SendThe contacts go up to the site's server, outbound only: no door is left open on the house, nothing is reachable from outside.
4. 4SortThe server files every contact with no duplicates, rebuilds the flights, resolves routes and identities as best it can. That is the log and statistics you browse.
5. 5Show liveThe same stream feeds the live map: every aircraft the antenna hears glides onto it the moment it is received, with its telemetry and its trail, within the station's real coverage.

Thanks and links

This site owes a lot to the communities maintaining open data: OurAirports for airports, the standing-data project for routes and types, OpenSky for the aircraft registry, planespotters.net for photos, and OpenStreetMap for map tiles. Thanks also to the safety card and first-flight cover traders who have fed the collections for years.

A special word for British Airways: the only airline that ever answered my written requests for safety cards (no card, but documents about Concorde instead), and always a flawless welcome on my travels, all the way to Barbados: lovely crews, cockpit visits. I fly with them whenever I can.