Sostieni Chris

Tinfoil Pigeons is a free retro radar scope for the sky over your head. Type in where you are and get a sweeping green-phosphor display of everything the so-called "authorities" are letting fly over your house: airliners, military transports that officially aren't there, air ambulances, the occasional plane shaped like a whale.

It's free. It will stay free. There are no ads, no accounts, no tracking, and no premium tier where the interesting planes live — every pigeon is for everybody.

But it isn't free to run. Behind the vintage glow there's hosting, a growing fleet of receiver antennas being bolted into lofts around Britain (each one about £160 of Raspberry Pi, software-defined radio, and marital goodwill), and an unreasonable amount of time spent working out why one specific helicopter over North Wales wasn't showing up. Every coffee goes toward keeping the scope sweeping and putting more antennas where the gaps are — which means more aircraft on your screen, especially the low, fast, interesting ones the big trackers miss or politely pretend not to see.

If the site has ever shown you a Spitfire, a spy plane, or a Beluga, and that improved your day even slightly: that's what the tip jar is for.

The pigeons thank you. Officially, of course, none of this ever happened.