Devices by country and region

How many electronic conspicuity devices flew in each country in a month, and in which regions. Choose a month, a system and a kind of aircraft, then open a country, on the map or in the list, to see its regions and the systems and aircraft there. The counts come from the nightly batch of section 10.6 of the method.

Makers and firmware

Who makes the devices, and which FLARM firmware they run. The maker is known only where an address names one: the FANET specification assigns the first byte of every FANET address to a maker, and an instrument that sends FANET, FLARM and ADS-L does so under one address, so the maker it names carries to the other two. A FLARM device that never sends FANET has no maker here, which is most of them, since FLARM's own hardware code has no public table. The firmware version is the one FLARM devices put in their packets, the latest one each device sent in the month.

What is counted

A device is one address on one system, for example a FLARM address or the identifier of a phone app. It counts in a country or region when at least one of its positions there was airborne during the month. Positions on the ground, rotating random addresses and devices that asked not to be tracked are left out.

The page counts the uncertified systems that light aviation carries for collision avoidance and tracking. ADS-B is left out: the network’s receivers hear it mostly from airliners, which would make up nine devices in ten in Germany, and the data does not yet tell the light aircraft among them apart.

The kind of aircraft is the category each device declares in its own packets, as set by whoever configured it: a FLARM moved from a glider to a paraglider without being reconfigured still says glider, and some devices declare none. A device that declared more than one kind in a month counts once, under the lowest category number, the rule of the monthly device counts.

The map colours each country by the choice above it. With one system chosen, the colour is that system’s share of the country’s devices of the aircraft chosen, so that a small country and a large one read alike; a country with fewer than 20 such devices is left uncoloured, since a share of two or three devices means little. With all systems, the colour is the number of devices, on a logarithmic scale. A pilot who carries two systems counts under each, so the shares of one country can add up to more than 100%.

Each figure is a count of distinct devices at its own level. A device that flies from the Grappa into Trentino is in both Veneto and Trentino-Alto Adige, and once in Italy, so the regions of a country add up to more than the country. The same goes for systems: a pilot who carries a FLARM and a phone app appears under each, and once under all systems together.

A device is not a pilot. One pilot can carry several devices, and one aircraft can lend its device to several pilots. The counts also follow where the Open Glider Network has receivers and where phone users share their position. A valley without a station, or with a station down for a week, shows no radio device however many fly there, and the app counts include only the people whose app forwards to the network at all.

The counts start on 18 October 2026, rebuilt from the recording of the feed (19 October is missing, since eleven hours of it were never recorded), so that month is incomplete, and the current month grows each night with the previous day. The addresses behind the counts are kept for the current and the previous month and then deleted, which leaves only the totals shown here. Small counts are published as they are, down to one device, since the network publishes every position live to anyone.

Reading these figures