Project
About
FlyItalyADSB is Italy's first ADS-B flight tracking community. Born from a group of aviation enthusiasts, it has grown into a data collection infrastructure with global coverage and applications in scientific research.
Non-profit
No commercial objective. The infrastructure is maintained by volunteers and Nesso Labs at no cost to users.
Unfiltered data
No FAA, LADD or BARR filters. Data is transmitted as received — including military aircraft via MLAT.
Open source
Stack based on readsb/tar1090/mlat-server by wiedehopf. All core software is public and freely reusable.
History
FlyItalyADSB was founded as a community of flight tracking enthusiasts in Italy. The network expanded progressively across the country — from the Alps to Sicily, from the Tyrrhenian Sea to the Adriatic coast — with receivers covering up to 400 km each. Over time, the feeder community grew beyond Italy to include receivers across Europe and beyond, giving FlyItalyADSB a genuinely global ground network.
In 2023, following the acquisition of ADS-B Exchange by JETNET (private equity), the non-profit tracking community fragmented. FlyItalyADSB maintained its independence and positioned itself alongside new community players such as adsb.lol, adsb.fi and airplanes.live — all based on the same open source stack, all non-profit, all unfiltered.
Coverage today is global: beyond the ground network, the aggregation server receives data from adsb.lol and theairtraffic.com, extending the map worldwide. Italian MLAT remains a unique feature: FlyItalyADSB is the only network with active MLAT triangulation over Italy, including military flights.
In 2025, Mode-S data collected by the network became the foundation of the Weather 3.2 meteorological research project, which uses aircraft as high-altitude wind sensors to validate ERA5 reanalyses and IASI profiles.
Infrastructure
Nesso Labs
FlyItalyADSB's infrastructure — Kubernetes cluster, distributed storage, data pipelines — is managed by Nesso Labs. FlyItalyADSB is the first "Nesso Data" project in the airspace mobility domain: collection, processing and distribution of public data — the same philosophy as the Nesso Equity project in the financial domain.
Contact
Research inquiries
Access to historical datasets, raw Mode-S data, MLAT CSV — for university or institutional research.
[email protected]GitHub
Source code for custom components: myflyitalyadsb, readsb fork, mlat-server, wp-stato-mlat.
github.com/flyitalyadsb ↗For technical support on feeder setup or network questions, use the community GitHub Discussions channel or write to [email protected]. We respond within 48 hours.