Features¶

An exhaustive tour of what Frank's Flight Radar does, grouped by area. Each item links to the page where it's explained in full where relevant.

Live radar display¶

Real ADS-B traffic from airplanes.live's free community network, plotted by position around a home location you choose.
Six zoom ranges — 10, 25, 50, 100, 200, and 400 km radius, selected with the rotary encoder. A row of dots near the top shows the current level at a glance. Traffic is queried out to roughly 185 km regardless of the step, so the two widest views show the nearer traffic on a wider canvas rather than filling the outer ring — see Data & connectivity for why.
Nearest-first — when more aircraft are in range than the device can hold, it keeps the closest ones rather than whichever arrived first in the response.
Smooth motion (dead reckoning) — between polls, airborne aircraft glide along their heading at their reported ground speed instead of jumping on each refresh. Position is extrapolated for up to two minutes, so a missed poll never flings a stale mark across the screen.
Heading arrows — moving aircraft show a short arrow in their direction of travel.
Position trails — the selected aircraft leaves a fading breadcrumb trail of its recent reported positions. (Shares the Heading trails setting.)
Colour-coded state — airborne, on-ground (grey), selected (accent), and emergency (red, with an extra ring).
Drag to go anywhere — no boundary: drag across countries or oceans and the radar fetches the traffic that's actually there. A reticle icon snaps back home, a house icon adopts wherever you've landed as the new home, and the home crosshair stays on screen so you can see which way it is. (In follow mode the drag stays bounded and display-only, so the tracked aircraft can't be lost off-screen.)
Selectable aircraft icon — plain dots with a heading arrow, or heading-oriented plane shapes.
Callsign labels — show none, only the selected aircraft, or all of them.
Range rings — three concentric rings with an N tick and distance labels (toggleable).
Battery gauge — a discreet cell at the top right showing charge level, amber below 30% and red below 10%, with a charging bolt while plugged in. Shown only on hardware that reports battery state; the M5Dial does not, so it stays hidden there.
Poll sweep — a small ring near the bottom of the screen with a segment sweeping continuously round it. It's driven by the clock rather than the refresh schedule, so it never stalls mid-cycle: if it's turning, the device is alive. Its colour carries the feed's health — normal, bright while a request is in flight, red if the last one failed. Can be switched off under Settings → Poll sweep.

See Using the Device.

Maps & background¶

Three selectable Map modes (Settings → Map):

Lo-fi (default) — an offline vector map: coastlines, national borders, rivers, and lakes drawn as themed lines, plus labels for major cities and airports. The whole world is baked into the firmware, so it works anywhere with no network, switches instantly, and stays smooth even while following a moving aircraft.
Full — a real OpenStreetMap raster-tile street map, fetched per location/zoom and cached to flash. See Map & Caching.
Off — a plain themed background (classic radar-scope look).

Supporting behaviour:

Flash tile cache — raster maps are content-addressed by location + zoom, so revisiting a view is instant.
Background precaching — while idle, the device quietly caches the other zoom levels (and your saved favourites) so switching is instant.

Aircraft interaction¶

Tap to inspect — tap any aircraft for a detail panel, then tap the panel itself to step through three pages: summary (callsign, ICAO24 address, altitude, speed, heading, type code, GND flag), position (lat/lon, squawk code, distance from home, position age), and identity (registration, full aircraft description, operator/airline). See Using the Device.
Rotate to cycle — with an aircraft selected, the dial steps the selection through the visible aircraft instead of zooming.
Follow mode — tap FOLLOW in the detail panel to lock onto an aircraft; verified in flight to hold a tracked aircraft within ~100 m of centre, and to coast through multi-minute coverage gaps and re-acquire. The view stays glued to it (a reticle marks the tracked point, home becomes an offset marker, and its altitude/speed print below its mark) as it moves. Follow is a locked mode — ordinary taps don't back out of it — with its own controls: UNFOLLOW to stop, HIDE OTHERS to declutter down to just the tracked plane, and drag anywhere to pan the view (e.g. to see something the buttons are covering) — while panned, a reticle icon appears on the right edge and a plain tap anywhere recentres. Ends automatically if the aircraft leaves coverage. See Using the Device.
Emergency squawk detection — 7500 (hijack), 7600 (radio failure), and 7700 (general emergency) are highlighted in red, auto-follow onto the aircraft, and trigger a bezel ring-flash and an optional buzzer. See Emergency Alerts.

Location & setup¶

Captive-portal setup — first boot broadcasts a Franks-Flight-Radar-Setup WiFi network with a browser-based wizard for WiFi and location. See Getting Started.
Always-on web config — once on your network the device serves its settings page at http://flightradar.local continuously. The Config page carries the whole settings menu (location, favourites, and every display option) as dropdowns generated from the same list the device menu uses, so the two can't drift. Configure WiFi is separate and handles only credentials. Nothing is interrupted while you use it.
IP auto-detect — leave the location fields blank and the device locates itself (approximately, from its public IP) once online. No coordinate lookup needed.
Place-name search — type a place (e.g. Berlin) instead of coordinates; it's geocoded via OpenStreetMap after the device reconnects.
Manual coordinates — enter precise decimal lat/lon if you prefer.
Detect location (Settings) — re-run IP auto-detect any time, e.g. after moving.
Saved favourites — store up to three named locations and jump between them instantly (their maps are pre-cached). See Favourite Locations.

Data & connectivity¶

Keyless flight data — airplanes.live's free community ADS-B API. No account, no API key, nothing to configure.
Selectable refresh rate — 5/8/15/30 s, default 8 s (well inside airplanes.live's fair-use guidance).
Off-thread fetching — the network request runs on its own core, so the dial and touchscreen stay fully responsive even when the connection is slow or dropping.
Failure tolerance — a failed poll keeps the last known traffic on screen (marks keep dead-reckoning) rather than blanking the radar, with the poll sweep red; the next scheduled poll retries. If a feed that was working stops landing anything for five minutes, the device restarts itself for a clean heap.
API status panel — tap the poll sweep (or use Settings → API status) for the last request's outcome, HTTP code, payload size, and age.
Memory-safe fetching — large responses stream via a flash scratch file and parse one aircraft at a time, so the no-PSRAM device never runs out of RAM.
Bounded query radius — traffic is requested out to about 185 km however far the display is zoomed. Response size grows with the square of the radius: measured over UK airspace, 100 km returns ~13 KB but 400 km returns ~150 KB, which took around five seconds to transfer and parse — longer than the refresh interval itself, so the data was stale before it arrived. Nearly all of it was discarded anyway, since the device holds a fixed number of aircraft and keeps the nearest. Capping the query keeps the widest views responsive, at the cost of showing traffic within that radius rather than out to the ring.
WiFi auto-reconnect — reconnects automatically if the connection drops.

Display & personalisation¶

Four colour themes — Radar (green), Amber, Ocean, Neon. Everything recolours together, including the lo-fi map.
Units — imperial (ft/kts) or metric (m, km/h).
Traffic filter — airborne only, or include on-ground aircraft.
Min-altitude filter — hide aircraft below 1,000 / 5,000 / 10,000 / 20,000 ft.
Toggles — heading trails, range rings, emergency buzzer.
Custom boot splash — a plane icon over the "Frank's Flight Radar" name.

See Settings Reference.

System & reliability¶

Persistent settings — every option saves to flash immediately and survives reboots and firmware updates.
Firmware updates — check for and install new firmware from the same always-on web config page, with changenotes shown before you confirm; always a manual, explicit action, never automatic.
Power off — a menu item that cuts power via the M5Dial's power-hold latch when running on battery; the side button switches it back on.
Factory reset — hold the encoder button 3 seconds, or use the hold-to-confirm menu item, to wipe WiFi credentials, location, and favourites, then re-run setup.