About — Toprak ADS-B

What is this place?

Have you ever looked up at a plane flying overhead and wondered where it was going? I did too. This website is the result of my curiosity—an entirely self-built, self-hosted flight tracking system.

Unlike commercial flight trackers that rely on thousands of global receivers, the data you see here is being caught live by a small antenna sitting right here on my roof. It intercepts unencrypted radio signals (ADS-B) broadcasted by aircraft at 1090 MHz, processes them in real-time, and draws them on this map for you to explore.

How I Built It (For the tech-curious)

The Engine

I wrote a custom backend engine in Python that listens to the raw radio data stream. To make the website incredibly fast for visitors without crashing my server, I designed a Dual-Database Architecture using SQLite. One database acts as a lightning-fast cache for the live map, while the other quietly archives massive amounts of historical data in the background.

Smart Data Compression

Planes generate a lot of data—thousands of GPS points per flight. To save disk space, I implemented the Douglas-Peucker algorithm in my code. It analyzes the geometry of a flight path and deletes unnecessary data points on straight lines, keeping the exact shape of the curve while reducing file sizes by up to 95%!

The User Interface

I wanted the frontend to be buttery-smooth and beautifully designed. I skipped heavy frameworks and built the entire interface using Vanilla JavaScript, modern CSS (flexbox/grid), and PHP. The interactive altitude graphs and trail lines you see on the map are rendered directly in your browser using HTML5 Canvas and Leaflet.js.

No Tracking, Just Planes

Unlike modern websites, this project doesn't track you. There are no analytics, no cookies, and no data sold to third parties. It's a completely independent, self-hosted passion project meant purely for education and aviation enthusiasm.