About ArkSignal

ArkSignal is Arkansas's open network for sky, weather and radio. It began as a statewide network of 1090 MHz aircraft receivers and is growing to cover weather stations, radiosondes, repeaters and mesh radio. Neighbors, pilots and hobbyists point a small antenna at the sky, share what they hear, and together we get a live picture of what is overhead, outdoors and on the air.

Every aircraft carries a transponder that announces its identity, position, altitude and speed on 1090 MHz (ADS-B), and many small aircraft use 978 MHz (UAT). Each station in the network receives those broadcasts with an inexpensive receiver and sends them to a central hub, which merges them into one statewide picture. Where stations overlap, coverage is better, and when three or more stations hear the same aircraft the network can even work out the position of aircraft that do not broadcast one (MLAT). Where there are gaps, a new station fills one.

Want to add a station of your own? Start with How to Feed. Questions? Contact us.

ArkSignal is a hobby project, not a company or an organisation. It is built and run in spare time by two volunteers, with help from the people who run the receivers. It is free to use, comes with no guarantees, and may be down or change while we work on it.

• Live Map: every aircraft heard across the network, with filters, weather and radar layers, and a detail card for each aircraft that says how its position is known.
• Flights and Flight History: what is in the air now and what flew before, searchable by callsign, registration, type or hex code.
• Feeders, the Coverage Map and the MLAT network: who is part of the network, how well each station hears, and what the network covers.
• Airports and Hospitals: frequencies, runways, trauma levels, services and where each is, with the heliports that serve them.
• Weather Stations: members' own stations (Tempest, Ecowitt, Ambient, Davis, Home Assistant and more) with live conditions, charts and records, and a weather map.
• Radiosondes and Balloons: the National Weather Service balloons (and amateur balloons) over Arkansas and its neighbors, tracked live from launch to landing, with charts, launch sites and the stations that receive them.
• Repeaters: amateur radio repeaters, linked nodes and gateways in every mode (FM, DMR, D-STAR, Fusion, P25) from Hearham's open data and Arkansas hams, with a map, reports and sysop claims.
• Mesh Nodes: Meshtastic nodes around Arkansas that publish themselves, on a list, a map and a page for each, with who hears whom.
• ACARS: the short text messages between airliners and the ground (ACARS, VDL Mode 2, HF datalink) that members' receivers hear, with the latest ones on an aircraft's card and a station page for each receiver.
• APRS: the amateur radio packet network read around Arkansas: digipeaters and gateways, weather stations (many in the Citizen Weather Observer Program) and, optionally, moving stations, on a list, a map and station pages.
• River Traffic: the towboats, barges and boats on the Arkansas, White and Mississippi rivers and the lakes, heard by members' own AIS receivers, on a list, a map and a page for each vessel.
• Satellites: weather satellite pictures decoded by members' own receivers (Meteor-M, GOES), NOAA's newest GOES pictures, and when the space station and amateur radio satellites pass over, with their frequencies.
• Nets and Winlink Gateways: amateur radio nets with the time of the next one in your own time zone, and Winlink gateways with how far each is from you, kept by the network's members.
• County Map: every Arkansas county shaded by what is in it, with a page for each county.
• Trauma Map: Arkansas' trauma regions, zones and hospitals in one simple map, with each county and hospital labeled the way the Department of Health does.
• Planefence and Plane-Alert, Sky View, the Heatmap and other tools in the Tools menu.
• Sign-in alerts for the aircraft you care about, with notifications to your phone or chat.
• Service Status, Release Notes and the Roadmap: whether everything is working, what changed, and what we plan next.

The aircraft network was the first part. Members' weather stations, radiosonde (weather balloon) tracking and the county map are here now. Next are a repeater directory, APRS and mesh radio nodes, so one account and one set of maps cover what is overhead, outdoors and on the air. The Roadmap shows what is being built now.

Station owners decide how precisely their location is shown: by default it is rounded to roughly 5.4 nm, and each owner can choose anything from exact through twelve steps of rounding to hidden. The public pages show station names and statistics, never home addresses. Aircraft data is public radio traffic.

The site uses a sign-in cookie for members and stores your display choices (theme, clock and time zone) in your browser or account. It does not use advertising or tracking cookies, and aircraft lookups are made by the portal on your behalf, so the outside services do not see which aircraft you looked at.

This site stands on the work of many open-source projects and open data providers. Thank you to all of them. Each remains under its own license.

The look and workings of this portal are original to this network; none of the sites mentioned endorse it. This version of the portal was built on 2026-10-19.