Using AirNav RadarBox: features, filters and how it differs from other trackers

You are standing at the fence, a dot is blinking on approach – airline unclear, type unclear, and by the time you have opened the right app, it has landed. A flight tracker exists for exactly such moments, and AirNav RadarBox has long been one of the big services alongside Flightradar24 and FlightAware. Since December 2024 it has officially been called AirNav Radar. This guide shows you how to put the map, flight card, filters, notifications and playback to good use while spotting, what distinguishes the subscription tiers and where the service is stronger or weaker than other trackers.

AirNav RadarBox in brief

AirNav Radar is the consumer flight tracker of AirNav Systems. The company was founded in 2001 by André Brandão, a computer scientist and airline pilot. It is based in Florida, with research and development in Lisbon. For a long time the public service ran under the name RadarBox; the renaming came in December 2024. Since then AirNav has organized its products like this:

• AirNav Radar – website and apps for everyone who wants to follow flights
• AirNav FlightWatch – professional fleet tracking for operators
• AirNav XRange – ADS-B receivers and hardware

For you as a spotter, the renaming changes nothing fundamental: According to the operator, the features have stayed the same. In forums and videos you still read both names happily mixed together. A compact overview of the service without the how-to part is in the article RadarBox explained.

Where the data comes from

AirNav states that it merges data from 14 sources. The most important ones for everyday spotting:

• Ground-based ADS-B: Volunteers run receivers that pick up the aircraft’s position reports on 1090 MHz. In Europe this is the main source. How the technique works is explained in the guide Flight tracking with ADS-B for spotters.
• Satellite ADS-B: Over oceans and remote areas where no ground receiver stands. Background in the article on space-based ADS-B.
• MLAT: Aircraft without an ADS-B position report are located via time differences between several receivers – more under MLAT explained.
• Government data: Including FAA SWIM and EUROCONTROL, plus ADS-C for oceanic flights.

On its website, the operator speaks of more than 50,000 stations in over 190 countries. Such figures are self-reported and hard to verify. More important for you: How dense the coverage is around your home airport is quickest to see if you zoom in on the map and check whether taxi movements on the ground are displayed cleanly.

The map: first tour

When you open AirNav Radar in the browser or in the app, you land on the live map. Tapping an aircraft symbol opens the flight card, the most important tool while spotting.

What the flight card shows

Depending on the data available, you will find there:

• Flight number, registration and aircraft type
• Departure and destination airport with scheduled and actual times
• Flight duration, distance and the share of the route covered
• Altitude, position, ground speed and vertical speed
• Mode S address (hex code) and squawk
• Receiving station and data source

The last two fields are underrated: If it says MLAT or an estimate, the displayed position is less precise than with direct ADS-B. What is behind the hex code is in the article on the ICAO 24-bit address. How to read colors and symbols on flight tracker maps in general is summarized in Flight tracker symbols and colors explained.

Route, Follow and Flight Feed

Below the flight card are three handy buttons:

• Route hides all other flights and shows only the route of the selected aircraft with its start and end point.
• Follow keeps the map centered on the aircraft – useful when you watch an approach over several minutes.
• Flight Feed lists all aircraft currently in the visible map area. At the spot this is often faster than tapping one by one: You zoom in on the final approach and see at a glance what is coming.

Map layers and settings

Through Layers you choose between several map styles from satellite to vector map, adjust brightness and add weather and labels. In the settings you set units (feet or meters, knots or km/h, nautical miles or kilometers) and whether airlines and airports are shown with IATA or ICAO codes. ICAO is worth it for spotters: The three-letter airline codes are more unambiguous, and you get used to the notation that also appears in radio and flight plans.

Filters: reducing the map to what matters

The filters are the real strength of AirNav Radar. According to the provider, twelve criteria are available:

Filter	What you use it for while spotting
Airline	show only one airline, entered by name, IATA or ICAO code
Airport	only arrivals and departures of your spotting airport
Altitude	filter out approaches below a certain altitude, hide overflights
Speed	separate slow taxi movements from fast overflights
Aircraft class	separate traffic by class, such as military
Aircraft type	search specifically for a type, such as widebodies
Registration country	only aircraft with a particular country prefix
Squawk	find unusual transponder codes
Flight duration	separate long-haul from short-haul
Flight distance	similar to flight duration, by distance covered
Flight status	for example only airborne or only grounded aircraft
Data source	show or hide ADS-B, MLAT, satellite and other sources

In the browser you open the filter menu and pick a criterion; in the app you tap the filter icon. With the March 2025 update, the filter switch in the app moved to a more easily reachable spot. There is also a slider for altitude and speed as well as switches for individual data sources.

Which filters you can use without a subscription is decided by AirNav itself and has been adjusted in the past. The provider merely writes that advanced filters are tied to the subscription tiers. When in doubt, try out what your account tier unlocks.

Three filter recipes for spotting day

Airport view: arrivals and departures at a glance

If you search for an airport, you get lists of arrivals and departures including estimated or actual times. From there you jump directly to the aircraft on the map or into its history. The airport filter shows you only the traffic of that airport in parallel. On the website there is also a combined airport view with weather values such as wind, visibility, pressure and cloud base.

For spot planning, that means: At Frankfurt Airport or Munich Airport, you check the arrivals list in the morning for anything special and then set notifications. How accurate the displayed arrival times are and how much buffer you should allow is described in ETA predictions on flight tracker sites.

Setting up notifications

AirNav Radar can notify you on departure, approach and landing. On the website you open the notifications via the bell icon in the menu bar, in the app likewise via the bell at the top of the screen. In the management area you set what the alert responds to:

• a specific aircraft
• an airline or a flight
• an aircraft type or an aircraft class

Directly from the flight card it is even faster, for example with “notify me when the flight lands”. The alerts sync between your devices and the website and can also be delivered by email. With the March 2025 update, according to the provider, new parameters were added with which you fine-tune alerts. Which triggers your app version offers exactly, you can see in the notifications management area.

How to set up such alerts comparably across different services is shown in the guide Setting up notifications for aircraft, types and airlines. If an unusual transponder code catches your eye on the map, Squawk 7500, 7600, 7700 helps you make sense of it.

Playback, history and statistics

With Playback you replay the air traffic of a past period on the map. In March 2025 the function was overhauled and got new navigation. Through an aircraft’s history you see its latest flights and routes – handy for completing a sighting after the fact. How far back playback and history reach depends on the subscription.

Two functions set AirNav Radar somewhat apart from the competition:

• Aircraft Utilization Statistics: For a single aircraft, the service shows flight time and number of flights per month as well as averages over the last twelve months. That tells you whether an aircraft flies regularly or sits idle for longer.
• Export of flight tracks: Depending on the subscription tier, you download tracks as CSV, GeoJSON or KML, for example to lay them over your spot in Google Earth.

For matching your own photos with flight data, the article Matching sightings with ADS-B logs and flight tracker history is worthwhile. General tricks on flight history are in Looking up an aircraft’s past flights.

Extras for the curious

On the website, AirNav offers some extras that go beyond pure tracking:

• VHF AirBand Radio: Airband radio feeds from various countries directly in the browser. Whether and how you may listen to airband radio in Germany is clarified in Listening to airband radio – the legal situation.
• Weather layers: such as cloud cover, precipitation and volcanic ash, to varying extent depending on the subscription.
• Navigation data: Airways, beacons and waypoints as switchable layers as well as aeronautical charts from SkyVector.
• Heatmaps and traffic statistics: How often certain destinations are served from an airport.

The subscription tiers at a glance

AirNav Radar offers three tiers: Spotter, Pilot and Business, each with a seven-day trial. Without a subscription, you use the service with ads and a limited scope. According to the provider, the subscriptions differ mainly in:

• ad-free use
• period for history and playback
• available map layers and weather layers
• level of detail on the flight card
• filters, utilization statistics and export of flight tracks

Prices and the exact assignment of features change occasionally, so we give no amounts here. Look at the provider’s current subscription page before signing up. How this compares with the Flightradar24 subscriptions is shown in Flightradar24 Silver, Gold and Business.

Becoming a feeder: Business for free

As with other big services, AirNav Radar lives off volunteers who run receivers. You count as a feeder as soon as you deliver data to AirNav in real time – whether with a device from AirNav or your own setup such as a Raspberry Pi with an SDR stick. In return you get, according to the provider, a free Business subscription as long as you feed, plus a MyStation page with range, availability and rankings of your station.

On application, AirNav also ships free receivers, mainly to places where coverage is still thin. The conditions: a clear all-round view for the antenna, commissioning within a week of delivery and 24/7 operation. If you build your own, you will find the entry in Building an ADS-B receiver yourself. Which network gives what in return is compared in What feeders get in return, and how to supply several services in parallel is explained in Feeding several networks at once.

AirNav Radar compared with other trackers

The basic data of all the big services is similar because they rely on the same technology. Differences lie in usability, extra features and data policy.

Criterion	AirNav Radar	Flightradar24	FlightAware	ADS-B Exchange
Focus	Map with many filters, statistics, airband radio	widest reach, very mature app	flight status and airport data, strong in North America	community data focused on the most complete display possible
Filters	twelve criteria, advanced ones with subscription	extensive, partly with subscription	available, geared more toward flight search	very detailed, also used for military
Notifications	departure, approach, landing, by aircraft, airline, type or class	available, depending on subscription	flight status alerts	not the focus
Feeder benefit	Business subscription	Business subscription	Enterprise account	see feeder comparison

The table describes tendencies, not complete feature lists. Detailed guides to the competitors are under Flightradar24 step by step, Using FlightAware and ADS-B Exchange explained. The overall picture of all apps is provided by the flight tracker app comparison.

Limits every tracker has

• Blocked registrations: Certain aircraft, such as those of private and business travelers, are often not shown on commercial trackers or only without a registration. Unfiltered alternatives are presented in Community trackers compared.
• Coverage gaps: Near the ground and behind hills, reception drops off, especially at smaller airfields.
• Estimated positions: Without reception, services sometimes keep calculating the position. The data source on the flight card tells you how reliable the display is.
• Wrong assignments: Occasionally the flight number and registration do not match. At the fence the rule is: What you see in the photo beats any database. More in Finding aircraft by registration.

Conclusion

AirNav Radar, still known to many as RadarBox, is a full-fledged flight tracker with a few real spotter strengths: many filter criteria, flexible notifications for departure, approach and landing, utilization statistics for individual aircraft and a generous feeder model. If you stand at the Munich Airport visitors’ hill (Besucherhügel) or the Zeppelinheim viewing platform, the airport and altitude filters quickly give you a tidy map. No tracker is perfect – that is why it is worth keeping a second service handy for cross-checking.