An RTL-SDR dongle with an antenna in a window, plugged into a NixOS box at home, picks up ADS-B broadcasts from aircraft overhead. dump1090-fa decodes them into JSON. Raken reads that JSON and shows the aircraft on a dark map with trails from the last hour, a table sorted by distance and details for the selected aircraft, including registration, type and route.
There is no backend. The page is static files that poll the receiver’s JSON on the same origin. The receiver’s own location file supplies the home marker and range rings, so no coordinates live in the code. Airport names for routes come from OurAirports data, loaded only when a route is shown.
Nix builds it at a pinned commit and nginx serves it next to the receiver’s data on the homelab.