ADSBexchange is the world’s largest community-driven network of unfiltered Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B), Mode S, and Multilateration (MLAT) flight data feeders — a cooperative of volunteers who operate receivers at their homes and businesses worldwide, streaming live aircraft position, altitude, ground speed, and identification data to a central platform that displays it to anyone, without the privacy filters, government block lists, or military exclusions that commercial flight tracking services apply as standard practice.
The platform’s defining principle is the following: FlightAware, Flightradar24, and comparable commercial services honour the FAA’s Block Aircraft Registration Request (BARR) and Limiting Aircraft Data Displayed (LADD) programme. This allows aircraft owners including business aviation CEOs, government officials, and private individuals to have their flight data removed from internet-accessible tracking. ADSBexchange does not participate in those filtering programmes and displays every aircraft its feeders can receive, without exception, unless compelled by a court order valid in its jurisdiction. At any given time, ADSBexchange may be tracking over 15,000 aircraft worldwide, per a March 2025 Aviation Business analysis of ADS-B data monetisation.
ADSBexchange was acquired by JETNET in January 2023. This resulted in moving the platform from an independent community project to a subsidiary of an aviation market intelligence firm backed by Silversmith Capital Partners, a Boston-based growth equity firm with USD 3.3 billion under management. The acquisition generated immediate community anxiety about whether JETNET’s commercial incentives would erode ADSBexchange’s uncensored data policy — particularly after JETNET stated it intended to use ADSBexchange’s data pipeline for professional commercial aviation intelligence products.
Then, in August 2025, JETNET itself announced a further acquisition of ADSBexchange’s assets into its broader platform, deepening integration with JETNET’s aircraft valuation, transaction tracking, and operator intelligence databases.
.jpg){kind=link}
How ADS-B Technology Turns Invisible Aircraft Signals Into Live Flight Tracking
Understanding what ADSBexchange displays — and what its volunteers are actually receiving with their hardware — requires understanding the engineering principles of ADS-B itself, the surveillance technology that has supplanted radar as the primary aircraft position reporting system in controlled airspace worldwide. The FAA’s official ADS-B technology page defines it precisely: Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast is a performance-based surveillance technology that combines: an aircraft’s GPS positioning source, its avionics, and ground infrastructure into a surveillance interface between aircraft and air traffic control:
- “Automatic” because the aircraft transmits without any pilot action
- “Dependent” because the position is derived from GPS or other suitable navigation systems rather than determined externally by radar
- “Surveillance” because it determines three-dimensional position and identification
- “Broadcast” because it transmits to anyone with appropriate receiving equipment, not just ATC.
The FAA’s ADS-B Ins and Outs explainer confirms the transmission cadence: ADS-B Out broadcasts an aircraft’s GPS location, altitude, ground speed, and other data to ground stations and other aircraft once per second — compared to radar’s five to twelve second update rate — making ADS-B positional data both more accurate and more current than any radar-based alternative.
Two frequencies are authorised: 1090 MHz Extended Squitter (ES), required for aircraft operating at or above 18,000 feet (FL180) and for commercial aircraft globally, and 978 MHz Universal Access Transceiver (UAT), an option available for general aviation aircraft operating below 18,000 feet within U.S. airspace.
The FAA mandated ADS-B Out compliance from January 2, 2020, requiring the equipment on all U.S.-registered aircraft operating in airspace where transponders were previously required — effectively the entirety of controlled airspace in the United States. As of July 2024, 168,144 N-registered aircraft were equipped with ADS-B Out, feeding a steady stream of unencrypted position data to anyone operating a software-defined radio (SDR) receiver.
.jpg){kind=link}
MLAT: The Fallback Technology That Tracks Aircraft Without ADS-B Equipment
Not every aircraft in the world carries ADS-B equipment — many older aircraft, military types, and aircraft operating outside ADS-B mandate zones still use conventional Mode S transponders that do not broadcast GPS position data. For these aircraft, ADSBexchange relies on Multilateration (MLAT) — a mathematically intensive technique that determines an aircraft’s position by measuring the precise time difference of arrival (TDOA) of its transponder signal across a network of multiple geographically separated receivers.
When multiple ADSBexchange feeders in different locations simultaneously receive a Mode S transponder reply from the same aircraft, the platform’s central processing system applies hyperbolic trilateration. This is the same geometric principle used in GPS itself to compute the aircraft’s position from the arrival time differences to an accuracy of approximately 100 to 300 metres.
MLAT requires a minimum of four geographically separated receivers to compute a three-dimensional position fix — the geometry needed to solve for latitude, longitude, and altitude simultaneously. ADSBexchange’s live tracking map distinguishes between ADS-B-sourced positions (accurate, GPS-derived, one-second updates) and MLAT-derived positions (computed, geometry-dependent, potentially lower update rates in areas with sparse receiver coverage).
For aviation journalists, researchers, and intelligence analysts, MLAT is particularly valuable because military aircraft that fly without ADS-B equipment can still be detected and positioned by the MLAT network whenever they operate transponders within range of multiple ADSBexchange ground stations.
The Deal That Changed ADSBExchange Forever
The January 2023 JETNET acquisition of ADSBexchange was the most consequential moment in the platform’s history since its founding — and the community’s response to the uncertainty it generated produced a permanent structural change in how uncensored flight data is distributed globally. The JetTip blog’s February 2023 analysis of the post-acquisition landscape documented that within two weeks of the January 25 sale announcement, four entirely new uncensored flight data aggregators had launched: adsb.fi, ADSB.lol, ADSB One, and TheAirTraffic.
ADSB One was started by Samuli (“tmantti”), who confirmed working with members of the original ADSBexchange team on the platform’s architecture and described its mission as providing “community-driven, open, and unfiltered access to worldwide air traffic data“. ADSB.lol was created by Katia, an Italian distributed systems engineer who described her motivation as providing “unrestricted air traffic access, both real time and historical“.
JETNET’s own press release framed the acquisition in explicitly commercial terms: “The acquisition extends JETNET’s product offering by providing real-time and historical flight data to the aviation industry.” JETNET CEO Mark R. Stubseid described the deal as combining ADSBexchange’s “unparalleled real-time flight data” with JETNET’s “comprehensive aircraft market intelligence” — language that confirmed the platform’s uncensored data was being integrated into a commercial intelligence product rather than maintained purely as a community resource.
The community concern was that JETNET’s obligations to commercial clients and potential regulatory pressure from the FAA’s LADD programme would eventually compromise ADSBexchange’s filtering-free commitment.
As of May 2026, ADSBexchange under JETNET ownership continues to display military and government aircraft without filtering — per its own official site description, still describing itself as “the world’s largest community of unfiltered ADS-B/Mode S/MLAT feeders“. But the existence of the four post-acquisition community alternatives means the uncensored flight tracking ecosystem is now structurally more resilient against any single ownership decision than it was before January 2023.
Inside The Most Controversial Flights Ever Tracked By ADSBExchange
ADSBexchange’s policy of showing all aircraft without filtering has made it an indispensable tool for aviation journalists, conflict monitors, government accountability advocates, and search-and-rescue researchers — applications that commercial filtered platforms structurally cannot support.
The platform’s partnerships page confirms its partnership with C4ADS, the Washington DC-based non-profit that uses data-driven analysis to disrupt global conflict, criminal, and sanctions networks — a partnership through which ADSBexchange’s unfiltered military and government aircraft data feeds directly into C4ADS conflict zone monitoring and sanctions evasion reporting.
Dictator Alerts, the widely followed social media account that tracks flights of aircraft operated by governments described as authoritarian regimes, uses ADSBexchange as its primary data source specifically because it is the only platform that will show those flights without political filtering.
Dan Streufert’s LinkedIn post announcing the JETNET acquisition noted that “the Curacao-based MQ-9 ‘Caribbean Reaper’ team uses ADSBexchange for situational awareness in surrounding airspace” — a reference to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection MQ-9 drone surveillance programme operating over the Caribbean. The MQ-9’s occasional ADS-B transmissions, visible on ADSBexchange but blocked on filtered platforms, gave aviation enthusiasts and researchers real-time visibility into otherwise classified U.S. government drone operations.
In the search for Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, which disappeared on March 8, 2014, the limitations of existing filtered tracking platforms were brutally exposed — ADSBexchange’s volunteer-sourced receiver network would have provided substantially better pre-disappearance positional data had it been operating at its 2026 density at the time of the flight, a counterfactual that has driven increased investment in both space-based ADS-B reception and the ground receiver density that ADSBexchange’s volunteer community provides.
How Volunteers Built ADSBExchange Into a Global Aircraft Surveillance Giant
The technical barrier to becoming an ADSBexchange feeder — and contributing to the world’s most comprehensive public flight tracking dataset — is lower in 2026 than it has ever been, thanks to commoditised software-defined radio hardware and fully documented open-source receiver software. the basic hardware requirements include:
- an antenna positioned to receive 1090 MHz signals
- an SDR USB device (typically a Realtek RTL2832U-based dongle available for under USD 30)
- a cable connecting antenna to SDR
- a low-power computing device (a Raspberry Pi running the open-source dump1090 or readsb decoder software)
- an internet connection to upload the decoded data stream to ADSBexchange’s ingestion servers.
ADSBexchange’s contributor community confirms that data contributed by feeders is subject to a royalty-free, worldwide, perpetual, and irrevocable licence agreement — meaning volunteer data powers both the free public tracking map and the commercial API products that generate the revenue to sustain platform operations. As of March 2025, ADS exchange operates 14,000 active feeds globally.
Contributors in countries such as Nepal, which houses Lukla – the most dangerous airport in the world, specifically face an additional opportunity and challenge: Tribhuvan International Airport (KTM) sits in a mountainous bowl whose terrain limits the effective range of ground-based receivers on standard omnidirectional antennas, making elevated feeder positions — on hillsides or tall buildings with line-of-sight to approach paths — disproportionately valuable to regional tracking coverage.
ADSBexchange Versus FlightAware, Flightradar24, And the Post-Acquisition Alternatives
The flight tracking landscape in 2026 is substantially more differentiated than the two-platform world of FlightAware and Flightradar24 that existed when ADSBexchange first became prominent in the late 2010s. FlightAware operates its own worldwide network of proprietary ADS-B receivers at hundreds of airports in conjunction with airport operators, supplemented by community feeders — but applies FAA LADD and BARR filtering to all public displays.
Flightradar24 similarly maintains an extensive proprietary receiver network and applies commercial filtering policies, though its coverage is generally considered superior in Europe. Both platforms generate commercial revenue from airline operations, corporate aviation, and travel services integrations that create institutional incentives to maintain filtering policies.
adsb.fi — the most successful of the four community alternatives that emerged after the JETNET acquisition — has grown rapidly by positioning itself explicitly as a non-profit, community-controlled successor to the original ADSBexchange model, combining open-source software with a governance structure designed to resist commercial pressure.
OpenSky Network, a Swiss academic non-profit that has operated since 2013, offers a different but complementary service: a structured research API allowing academics to query historical flight data, with a focus on research reproducibility and data quality rather than real-time visualization.
The practical recommendation for users who require genuinely unfiltered data — for journalism, research, or accountability monitoring — is to cross-reference ADSBexchange, adsb.fi, and ADSB One simultaneously, since receiver coverage gaps and occasional server-side issues mean that no single platform captures every aircraft on every flight, but the combined community coverage approaches comprehensiveness.