Overhead
What is above you, right now.
Overhead turns a block of your Stream Deck into a radar scope showing the aircraft that are actually in the sky — over any airport in the world, or over you. Not a picture of a radar: one continuous scope stretched across the keys you give it, with the bezels acting as part of the instrument.
Submitted and waiting on Elgato's review. Write to us if you want a note when it lands.
Every contact is a real aeroplane
Positions come from a network of volunteer ADS-B receivers, so what you are looking at is the traffic that is genuinely up there — at the level and heading it is really flying. Coastlines, borders, cities and airfields are drawn underneath in phosphor green, and the rings run off the edges of a wide deck exactly as they do on a real scope. The range is a ring you can read, not the edge of the glass.
Tap a key to ask what that is
Every key is a piece of sky. Tap one and it steps through the aircraft drawn on it, one press at a time, then back to a clear picture. The details land in the corner furthest from whatever you selected — so the panel never covers the aeroplane it is describing.
Callsign, aircraft type, registration, flight level, ground speed and heading. When the flight has a published route you also get where it came from and where it is going, with a dotted great circle running out to the destination.
Or ride along with it
The details block is also a button. Press that key and the scope anchors to the aircraft: the map slides underneath while it flies and only that one aeroplane is tracked, which asks less of the feed than watching an area does. Press it again and the scope drops straight back to where you started.
Or let it choose
Switch on unattended mode and it picks out an aircraft every few seconds on its own, looks up where it is going, and shows you. Good on a spare deck — the scope always has something to say without anyone pressing anything.
Everything is drawn as itself
At six pixels, shape carries more than any label can. So an airliner is a swept chevron and a heavy is wider; light aircraft have straight wings; a glider is a single long span; and a helicopter is a rotor disc that actually turns, because something hovering over a hospital has no track worth pointing along.
- Airliners and heaviesswept chevrons, wider for four engines
- Light aircraft and glidersstraight wings, and a single long span
- Helicoptersa rotor disc that turns
- Airfieldsringed in blue and labelled with their code
- Conflicttwo above 5,000ft closing inside 5nm and 1,000ft
- Followingthe map sliding under one aircraft you chose
It keeps moving between polls
The feed is a free service run on donations by people with receivers in their lofts, so it is asked once every eight seconds and no more. In between, every aircraft is carried forward on its own track, speed and rate of climb at twelve frames a second — and eased onto each new fix rather than snapped to it, so a correction arrives as a slide rather than a twitch.
An aircraft that misses a poll coasts rather than blinking out, because a missed message is not a landing. If the feed cannot be reached at all the scope says so and keeps flying what it already knows.
Range, and what it shows you
Ten miles to a hundred and fifty, and the level band opens up as you zoom in: at long range you are watching the en-route flow, and at short range you are watching the circuit. Without that, a hundred miles around London is three hundred and fifty aircraft and a solid mat of chevrons.
Point it anywhere
Type an airport code or a city name and the scope moves there — 3,270 airfields are built in, from Heathrow to the strip down the road. Or press one button and it centres on you, worked out from your network address. Or type coordinates, if you know exactly where you want to look.
Where the data comes from
The feeds that make this possible are run on donations by people who fly receivers in their lofts, so the plugin is built to be light on them: one request every eight seconds, backing off the moment it is refused, and a single-aircraft request while following rather than the whole area.
- Positions adsb.lol
- community ADS-B, licensed ODbL 1.0
- Routes adsbdb
- queried live for the aircraft you tapped, and never written to disk
- Coastlines Natural Earth
- public domain, simplified and built into the plugin
- Airfields OurAirports
- public domain, 3,270 fields built in
Coverage is whatever volunteers receive: excellent over Europe and North America, thinner over oceans and remote country. Some military and privately-flagged aircraft do not appear at all.
What it doesn't do
No account, no sign-in, no analytics. The only thing that leaves your machine is a request for the patch of sky you are pointed at. The one exception is the location button, which asks a public service what city your address is in — and only when you press it.
It is quiet
No sound, no notifications, nothing to dismiss. It sweeps while you look at it and waits while you do not, so it can sit on the deck between other work without asking for anything.
Requirements
- Stream Deck app
- 7.1 or newer
- Devices
- Any Stream Deck with keys
- Platforms
- macOS 12+ and Windows 10+
- Keys needed
- 2×2 is what the art is drawn for; a single key works, with less sky
- Internet
- Required — the aircraft are live
Version
v1.0.0
First release. One scope across the whole block, 3,270 airfields built in, tap to identify, routes and destination lines, follow mode, unattended mode, aircraft drawn by type, conflict alerting, and dead reckoning between polls.
Support
Something wrong, or an idea for it? Write to us and a human will answer.
- Your Stream Deck app version and operating system
- Which device, and how many keys the scope covers
- Where it was pointed, and at what range
- The plugin log from the de.7bp.overhead.sdPlugin folder