From a single home receiver to a multi-domain awareness platform spanning air, sea and space, built on low-cost hardware, open-source software and publicly available data.
mlat.uk began as a single ADS-B receiving station on off-the-shelf hardware: a Raspberry Pi 4B paired with a generic software-defined radio.
A sustained programme of signal-chain optimisation followed. A custom receive chain with a tuned antenna, cavity filtering, a low-noise amplifier and a high-performance SDR extended reliable coverage from around 50 to over 200 nautical miles: a four-fold gain in domain awareness through disciplined engineering rather than raw power.
The same discipline was applied at sea. A parallel AIS receive chain, using SAW rather than cavity filtering, extended local marine coverage, and the two data sets were fused into one operating picture across both domains.
To extend coverage further, the project opened to volunteer contributors running their own ground sensors. The public service moved to a dedicated aggregator on a VPS, keeping the originating station isolated and decoupling public access from the private infrastructure behind it, an operational security principle borrowed from resilient network design.
Development turned to the user interface, improving how marine traffic sits alongside air traffic, and to the backend, with a custom ingestion pipeline that draws marine telemetry from a public API and translates it back into raw NMEA sentences for processing.
Ingesting open two-line element (TLE) orbital data added live satellite tracking alongside the air and maritime layers, proving that low-cost hardware, open-source software and public data can combine into a single, easy-to-use, multi-domain awareness platform.
The map became a full-screen web app that installs straight to a phone’s home screen, tuned for modern displays, with no app store in between.
mlat.uk now runs its own multilateration server. Contributors’ receivers share precise timing data, and by comparing when each one hears the same signal, the network locates aircraft that don’t broadcast their own position. Coverage grows area by area as more stations join, turning a community of feeders into a sensor network in its own right.
Although the data shown on mlat.uk comes from a network of volunteer contributors, mlat.uk itself is privately owned and independently operated, developed, maintained and controlled by one individual. There is no company, team or organisation behind the site.
Every object on the map is drawn with a consistent visual language, so you can read type, status and altitude at a glance.
Aircraft positions come from a network of volunteer ground sensors using ADS-B and MLAT. Each icon's outline matches the aircraft type, and its fill colour follows a continuous gradient keyed to altitude, giving an immediate read of vertical separation across the picture.
Alongside commercial traffic, dedicated outlines are drawn for a wide range of specialist and military airframes, such as the F-35 Lightning II and C-5 Galaxy shown above, extending awareness beyond civil aviation.
Surface traffic is tracked via AIS, using a small, consistent set of icon shapes.
Vessels are coloured by type. The key below uses the moving-vessel icon as the reference shape.
Space domain awareness is built in. Open orbital element data and the public satellite catalogue from CelesTrak are propagated with SGP4/SDP4 using satellite.js, so space objects are plotted on the same timeline and map as air and maritime traffic.
Space objects are categorised by primary mission type, with distinct shapes for crewed stations and military assets.
Like the maritime layer, space objects are colour-coded by operational category.
Selecting a satellite shows its owner, launch details and a one-line orbit summary, from its orbit class (low, medium, geostationary, highly elliptical and so on) to its lowest and highest altitude, inclination and period. Each satellite also shows how old its orbital elements are, with anything over a week flagged as stale. More on the details panel.
Across all domains, military-flagged objects are shown only where their location data is already publicly available. No non-public or restricted tracking data is collected, processed or displayed.
This project relies on the hard work of several open-source communities and public data providers.
The foundational Ultrafeeder package used for the user interface.
Open aviation data streams.
Marine AIS telemetry and data sharing.
Publicly available orbital elements and satellite catalogue (SATCAT) data for space domain tracking.
SGP4/SDP4 calculations for satellite propagation.
Free basemap tiles built on OpenStreetMap data.
Openly licensed vessel and satellite images, each credited on the map.
For more information, or to collaborate, I would be glad to hear from you.
Telemetry provided by a network of volunteer contributors, augmented with data from public sources. Data: AISHub contributors, airplanes.live, CelesTrak. For personal, non-commercial situational awareness only, supplied “as-is” without warranty. No scraping, resale or redistribution of the data or service. Privacy Policy.
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