Around me, favourites & alerts
Things that are about you: a card for your own location, the satellites that pass over it, and a watch-list that tells you when something you care about turns up.
Around me
Choose Around me in the menu. It is always about your own location, so the map needs to know where you are: allow location when the browser asks, or it uses the last place it saved on this device (marked Your last known location, with an Update button). If it has neither, the card just asks for your location. Once known, a blue pin marks the spot. On a phone the card is a full-height sheet.
| Tab | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Air | Your nearest airport and its weather, sunrise and sunset, a warning row if anything nearby is squawking an emergency, the five nearest aircraft, and the flights at the airport. |
| Maritime | Your nearest port, with tide and sea state when you are within 25 nautical miles of one, and the vessels within 20 nautical miles with how close each will come. |
| Space | Space weather from NOAA, the next ISS and Tiangong passes with cloud cover and a sky chart, bright passes, what is overhead now, and how dark the sky and the moon are tonight. |
Satellite passes
Choose Show satellite passes under Satellites in the menu for a list of the visible passes over your location. Tap a pass to open a sky chart of it: north at the top, rings at 30 and 60 degrees, a dot where it rises, another at its highest point, and an arrow where it sets, with times. Show on map then selects the satellite.
Favourites & alerts
Choose Favourites in the menu (map view only). The card has two tabs.
Favourites
- Watching - everything you have starred, with its live status. Tap one to select it, or × to remove it. To add something, select it and tap the star in its details panel: it works for aircraft, vessels and satellites.
- Rules - watch for a kind of thing instead of one object: an aircraft type, a callsign or registration prefix, any military aircraft, any emergency squawk, or anything inside an area of 5 to 100 nautical miles around your location or the map centre. Rules apply to aircraft, vessels or both.
- Recent alerts - what has fired lately.
Interesting
A live list of notable traffic in view, six rows at a time with Show all for more, nearest the middle of the map first: emergencies (7500, 7600, 7700), military, aircraft flagged as interesting, helicopters, unusual types (a Beluga, an A380, a B-52 and so on) and aircraft that are very fast or very high. It covers the area on screen. Tap a row to go to it.
When you are alerted
An alert fires when a watched object reappears after 10 minutes unseen, when something squawks an emergency code, when a rule matches, when something enters your area, and when a visible satellite pass is about to start (that needs your location). Each object alerts at most once every 30 minutes, and nothing fires in the first 20 seconds after the map loads. You see a notice you can tap, a red dot on the menu button and a count in the browser tab; there is an optional beep (Sound, off by default) and, if you allow Notifications, a system notification when the page is in the background.
Note: alerts only work while the map is open, in a tab or as the installed app. Nothing is sent when it is closed. Favourites are kept on this device.