AirNav RadarBox Arrived!

In my last post I said I was waiting on an AirNav RadarBox to arrive. Well it came yesterday and I'm very impressed. This is the slightly older unit from 2009 but it works great and does what I want it to do.

The box itself is quite small and the metal casing houses the internal components of the device. It comes with a magmount antenna and a metal grounding plate which works ok on the window sill but I've mounted the antenna outside on one of my TK brackets which made for much better coverage. I do plan on raising the antenna high enough when I get time.

I plugged everything in, installed the drivers from the CD that was included in the package and it was really as simple as that! Everything worked great first time.

As you can see from the picture below, the aircraft are displayed on a map which you can centre around any location (I've picked my local airport which I live a few miles from). It shows the flight number, aircraft registration, type, altitude, speed and origin and destination.

You can split the screen in to 2 halves to be able to see a live list of aircraft displayed on the map. Some aircraft in the list aren't on the map due to the amount of data they trasmit. Many of these include military traffic which is the main reason I bought the box.


I already knew it wouldn't plot military traffic but it logs them in the database which is what I want. The left side of the screen provides a silhouette of the aircraft, airline logo and more detailed information on the plane and its flight.

The best bit for me, and the reason I bought the device is that it provides a detailed report on which aircraft have been received by it. It also shows when a particular aircraft was first picked up and when it was last received by the box. The grids log allows me to sort the database by airline, reg, type etc and also allows me to view received aircraft between two dates. The grids log also shows a picture of the aircraft where possible.

Reporter allows the user to generate a daily report of aircraft picked up which can be emailed from the programme itself to your email address.

I'm really happy with this radar box for the price. £50 is a bargain and it's a handy tool to use if you're interested in aircraft and are curious as to what's flying in the local area. You can subscribe to the network to receive data from other boxes via the internet but I prefer seeing what's local.

Thanks for reading!

73's, Lewis M3HHY.

Manchester, UK.