Your cockpit to the sky — professional-grade flight tracking for your own ADS-B receiver
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
• Detailed flight info: Callsign, altitude, speed, track, vertical rate, category, route, country of registration, and more
• Custom alerts: Get notified based on callsign, type, altitude, squawk, speed, or distance — with optional wildcard matching
• Share & Search: Instantly snapshot and share the radar view, or search by callsign, ICAO, registration, or type
• Record: Record all Map movements and share a 4K movie as seen in the App previews
• Historic data: Log flights locally to your own SQLite database for analysis and interesting stats
• Custom overlays: Free Aeronautical charts from openAIP.net and weather maps from OpenWeatherMap
• Fully customisable colours for aircraft, trails, ATC boxes, text and sharpness/brightness control for the Map
• Popular API support: adsbdb.com and airplanes.live for extended info & 250nm radar range
• Multi-station support: Expand your coverage by reading multiple ADS-B receivers
Why pilots & enthusiasts love ADS-B Radar:
• Plug & play setup
• Low CPU & energy usage
• Runs entirely private if preferred - no internet needed
• Use your data the way you want
• Super stable
Requirements: Your own ADS-B hardware receiver with JSON output, such as:
• Raspberry Pi + RTL-SDR running dump1090(fa)
• Jetvision Radarcape / Air!Squitter
• macOS + RTL-SDR running dump1090(fa)
Visit adsb-radar.com for setup guides, details and more screenshots.
This app hasn’t received enough ratings or reviews to display an overview.
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.
- Airplanes.live option to show only Military, Interesting, LADD or Private ICAO aircraft
- Export & Import your configuration settings
- Auto minimise Map is now optional
- Bug fix for data requests to adsbdb.com
- Bug fix for aircraft trail colour
Please keep sending your requests and submit your ratings & reviews !
Version 4.6
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
