Maps

Maps is a map for your organization with live aircraft on it. Open it at maps.dev.gov.vin or from the app switcher.

Access

Every member has both: saved places and watches are personal unless you share them. Owners and admins can change anything shared with the organization.

The map

The base map follows the app's light or dark theme on its own; Hybrid, Satellite and Terrain are one click away (top right). The layers menu turns aircraft, their trails and saved places on and off. Your last view, style and layers are remembered in this browser.

• Search: places and addresses (nearest to the map first), coordinates such as -37.8136, 144.9631 or 37.8136 S 144.9631 E, and aircraft by ICAO hex, registration or callsign. Pick a place to save it.
• Current location: the arrow button; it can keep following you.
• Measure: the ruler button, then click the map. Two points give a distance, three or more also the perimeter and area.

The map's data comes from Mapbox and OpenStreetMap; the "ⓘ" at the bottom right lists the credits and the Mapbox wordmark stays at the bottom left, as their terms require.

Saved places and shared maps

Saved holds your maps: lists of places, each with its own pin colour and icon (places can have their own). Add a place puts a pin where you click; a search result can be saved too. Share a map with My organization or Anyone with the link: the link opens a read-only map at maps.dev.gov.vin/s/… without signing in, and Make a new link stops the old one working.

Live aircraft

Aircraft come from an ADS-B network (adsb.lol by default; the credit is under the flights list and in the map's attribution). They're drawn by type (jets, heavies, turboprops, light aircraft, helicopters, gliders, balloons, drones, ground vehicles) pointing along their track and coloured by barometric altitude, with the last 15 minutes of track behind them.

Select an aircraft for its type, registration ("not broadcast" when it isn't), callsign, ICAO hex, squawk, barometric altitude, ground speed, vertical rate, track and when it was last seen, and the road it's following when a watch tracks it on one. Follow keeps it centred; Replay plays back its recorded track over the last 30 minutes to 24 hours; Watch starts a watch for it.

How live it is: a single poller asks the network for the areas your organization's watches cover, plus the area anyone is looking at, every 15 seconds or so. Looking somewhere new adds that area for a few minutes, so the first update there can take up to a minute. Recorded tracks (for replay) are kept two weeks, for aircraft while a watch covers them.

Flight watches

Watches → New watch, or Watch on an aircraft.

What to watch: any mix of ICAO hex (7C6B2D), registration (VH-ABC), callsign (POL31) and type (A139). A trailing * matches prefixes (POL*). Types match inside the watch's areas (or anywhere polled when it has none). Watching by hex works even when the aircraft doesn't broadcast its registration.

Areas: presets (Victoria) and circles or areas you draw on the map. They give Entered and Left events, decide where types match, and with Only aircraft inside these areas limit the whole watch.

Events:

Road following matches recent positions against OpenStreetMap freeways (motorways), highways (trunk roads) and, if you add them, main roads. Settings: corridor width each side of the road (250 m), heading tolerance (25°), how long it must follow (60 s, 70% of positions), repeat interval (5 minutes, 0 for none), how long off the road before it counts as left (90 s), and altitude and speed limits (below 6,000 ft, faster than 30 kt). Victoria's roads are loaded today; other regions are added on request.

Notifications: push to your devices, email, and SMS or phone calls once the platform's text service is on. The watch notifies you (Notify me) and any notification groups you pick. Same event again after holds back repeats of the same kind for the same aircraft (road repeats have their own interval; emergencies always go). Quiet hours hold notifications between two times in a time zone, except emergencies unless you untick that. Events are kept 30 days on the watch's page, with what happened to each notification.

Pause stops a watch without losing its settings.

Which aircraft

Every aircraft is told apart by its ICAO hex address, one per airframe. Callsigns and registrations aren't enough: several aircraft can fly under one operator's callsign pattern, callsigns are reused, and some aircraft broadcast neither (or are on a privacy list, so trackers show "N/A"). So:

• Each notification names the hex (A139 POL31 · 7C4EF4) and says what matched (callsign POL31, type A139).
• Two aircraft matching a watch at the same time (the same callsign twice, two of a type) are tracked, notified and logged separately.
• Lock to the first aircraft that matches pins the watch to the airframe that matched first; from then on only that hex counts. Unlock lets the next match pin again.

Lifetime

A watch can run forever, or:

An ended watch shows why it ended and can be restarted (its counters go back to zero; one whose end time has passed needs a new end time first).

Flight log

Each watch logs every flight of the aircraft it matches: from takeoff (or the first report in the air) to landing, a long loss of signal, leaving the watch's areas, or the watch ending. A log has the track, the watch's events and the roads followed with times. Keep logs 7, 30, 90 or 365 days, any number of days, or forever. Open a flight to see its track on a map, or download it as GPX, KML or CSV.

Notification groups

Groups collects people to notify. Members of the organization join at once. Anyone else (an email address and/or a phone number) gets a message asking them to confirm, and nothing is sent until they do (asked at most three times, an hour apart). Every message has a one-click unsubscribe link and header; someone who unsubscribes can't be asked again by the same entry. Group members only get the channels you tick for them, within the watch's channels.

Notifications on your phone

Select the bell in the header and Turn on for this device. On iPhone and iPad, add Maps to the Home Screen first (Share → Add to Home Screen) and turn notifications on from the installed app. Tapping a notification opens the aircraft on the map.

API and MCP

Everything here is in the API under /v1/orgs/:orgId/maps (see Maps and flight watches). AI clients get aircraft_find ("where is VH-ABC?"), aircraft_track, flight_watches_list, flight_watch_events, flight_logs_list and flight_log_get with maps:read, and flight_watch_create (with lifetime, pinning and logging options), flight_watch_pause and flight_watch_restart with maps:write (see MCP tools).