Turn your Mac into a live ATC radar display - The most beautiful ADS-B visualiser for macOS !
Turn your Mac into a live aircraft radar — right from your menu bar.
ADS-B Radar visualizer gives you instant, real-time tracking of aircraft within range of your own ADS-B receiver.
• Menu bar: See how many aircraft are in range instantly
• Dedicated Apple Maps interface: Smooth & Crisp graphics, Dark or Light Mode, all Map types supported
• Appearance Control: Set colours for aircraft, trails, ATC boxes, text and contrast/brightness control for the Map
• Detailed flight info: Callsign, altitude, speed, track, vertical rate, category, route, country of registration, and more
• Aircraft trails: Display all aircraft trails simultaneously to spot unusual patterns, while trail colours show altitude changes
• Custom alerts: Get notified based on callsign, type, altitude, squawk, speed, or distance — with optional wildcard matching
• Share & Search: Instantly take a snapshot and share the radar view, or search by callsign, ICAO, registration, or type
• Map Recording: Record all Map movements and share a time-lapse movie, compress hours of flight movements to minutes
• Historic data: Log flights locally to your own SQLite database for analysis and interesting stats
• Popular API support:
• Enable adsbdb.com for extended info from planebase.biz & photos from aircraft-data.com
• Enable Aeronautical charts from openAIP.net for a truly realistic ATC view
• Enable Weather maps from OpenWeatherMap to show precipitation, clouds or wind
• Enable Airplanes.live: Feed airplanes.live & boost your receiver to 250nm radar range
• Track Specific Aircraft: With airplanes.live highlight military, interesting or special aircraft
• Multi-station support: Expand your coverage by reading multiple ADS-B receivers
Why you will love ADS-B Radar:
• Super stable
• Plug & Play setup
• Low CPU & energy usage
• Clean, smooth and crisp UI
• Runs entirely private if preferred - no internet needed
• Use your data the way you want !
Requirements: Your own ADS-B hardware receiver with JSON output, such as:
• Raspberry Pi + RTL-SDR running dump1090(fa) -> Recommended setup
• macOS + macOS Python + RTL-SDR running dump1090(fa) -> For experts
• Jetvision Radarcape / Air!Squitter -> Commercial / Professional
Not sure if this is the App for you?
• Try our FREE ADS-B Radar Lite version first !
Visit adsb-radar.com for setup guides, details and more screenshots.
This app hasn’t received enough ratings or reviews to display an overview.
Cool, but could use some improvements.
NightRider743
The app is fun after you figure it out. I am using python3, running dump1090 on a Mac. Would love to have louder sounds on alerts, more details on the screen and option in the menu for more ATC features. When you hit the show/hide Radar Ring, your location settings gets reset (which sucks). Radar should center your location with little movement.
Developer Response
Thanks for the feedback ! Please reach out for any more suggestions via adsb-radar.com, new version is in the works.
Pretty and useful
cadeon924
It’s important to know what you’re getting here, you’re getting a visualizer, not the whole ADS-B data feeder, etc. If you are already into the ADS-B hobby this can be a useful app to you. It’s prettier than watching planes in a web browser, and if you know what’s up you can set up plane search features, etc, to your liking.
Developer Response
Thanks for the feedback !!
Stop shoving AI slop into everything
Once satisfied, now frustrated
Instead of linking to a search for an aircraft callsign, it opens up a useless Microsoft Copilot AI chatbot panel that doesn’t provide any pertinent information. Also, it insists on running as a finicky menu bar popover thing instead of a regular window like a normal application.
Developer Response
The search is user-configurable—you can point it to anything you like. By default, it’s set to AI, as it often returns interesting results. The app runs as a menu bar utility, always displaying nearby aircraft below its icon. Its window acts like a standard, resizable popup, but as of version 4.2, you can now choose to run ADS-B Radar in a regular window instead. Just Option-click the menu bar icon to switch between modes.
Extremely difficult to use
lj19809
Have spent two days trying to set it up on my MacBook with dump1090 running.
Developer Response
It's recommended to run dump1090 on a Raspberry Pi or similar. Getting dump1090 to run an a Mac is only for experienced users. The App itself works out of the box, just select a Demo setting from the menu and it's up-and-running ! Reach out over adsb-radar.com for support. Success !!
- More aircraft icons (Beechcraft, Heavy Transport, Amphibian, Tiltrotor, Fighter)
- Clutter free text display when looking for specific aircraft (like military only)
- Enhanced search: Only show specific ICAO's on the map
- Improved flight route display
- Minor bugfixes
Version 4.9
The developer, Jan Nutbroek, indicated that the app’s privacy practices may include handling of data as described below. For more information, see the developer’s privacy policy .
Data Not Collected
The developer does not collect any data from this app.
Privacy practices may vary, for example, based on the features you use or your age. Learn More
The developer indicated that this app supports the following accessibility features. Learn More
