OverHead Alpha · Product 01
A Wi-Fi desk instrument that shows the traffic actually flying above you — live, on a 2.1-inch round display, in an aviation-instrument body. Tap a target to find out what it is and where it's going.
The scope
Each target points along its actual track. You can tell a Chinook from a 737 from a Cessna at a glance, without reading a label — which is the whole difference between a map of dots and an instrument.
Altitude is colour
Amber below ten thousand, white through twenty-five, periwinkle above. Gold for military, red for an emergency squawk. The low, close, interesting traffic separates itself from the airliners passing over at thirty-seven thousand feet — before you've read a single number.
One tap
Actual on-glass card, shown at 2×
It notices for you
You find out a Chinook went over while you were making coffee. It never steals the screen from someone who's using it.
Alerts you wouldn't silence. It stays quiet for the hundredth regional jet of the day.
The other faces
The scope is the reason it exists. These are the reasons it stays on the desk.
Network-synchronised UTC with a sixty-tick seconds ring, local time alongside, daylight saving handled.
Pilots work in Zulu. A clock that's right without being set is table stakes for an instrument.
Live METAR for your home field — wind, visibility, ceiling and altimeter, decoded, with the raw observation underneath and the runway lit for the wind.
A student pilot checks this every day. The decoded version is for everyone else in the room.
Unique aircraft, distinct types, military count, busiest moment, farthest contact, and new arrivals per five minutes.
Turns a live display into something with a memory, and answers "is it busy today".
Setup
Colour scheme, range, clock, map, alerts and auto-cycle — one tap each. Brightness is a swipe from any screen.
Checks twice a day, then says so on screen with the version and what changed — and waits for you to choose Update or Later. Nothing installs on its own.
If the feed goes quiet the display marks the data as held and keeps tracking. If the network drops it says so. It never shows stale data as if it were live.
Four colour schemes
Night red is genuinely dark-adapted rather than just dimmed — an aviation convention, not a gimmick. All four switch live on the instrument at the top of the page.
Order
Free shipping in the US. International shipping and duties calculated at checkout. Sales tax added where applicable.
Not sure about coverage where you live? Send us your nearest airport code and we'll tell you honestly what you'd see before you order.
Questions
No. Alpha has no ADS-B receiver — the traffic arrives over your Wi-Fi from community ground stations. That's deliberate: it works indoors, on any desk, on a shelf, in an interior room, with no line of sight to the sky and nothing to mount. Plug it in and it's already receiving.
Live ADS-B, refreshed every five seconds, from community ground-station networks — principally adsb.lol, whose open data makes this product possible. We say live rather than real-time because community networks carry their own latency of a few seconds. Weather comes from the FAA's aviation weather service.
Coverage is excellent across North America and Europe, and good over most populated areas elsewhere — it depends on volunteers running ground stations near you. It thins out over oceans, deserts and remote terrain. If you're somewhere unusual, email us before ordering and we'll check your area honestly.
No. Traffic, weather, the clock and the logbook all work without a fee for the life of the instrument. There's no account to create and no app to install.
No. Alpha is an enthusiast desk instrument. It is not certified, not a traffic advisory system, and not for navigational use — on the ground or in the air. For flying, use your certified equipment and an approved EFB.
It raises its own network the first time you power it up. Join it from a phone or laptop, any page you open lands on the setup screen, pick your network from a live scan, and enter your location and home airport. Two minutes, no app.
Yes. METAR is available for most airports internationally, and traffic follows community ground-station coverage, which is strong across Europe. The instrument ships with a US plug; use your own USB-C supply elsewhere.
OverHead Works, a small hardware company in Maine, run by a pilot in flight training who wanted one of these and couldn't buy one. Instruments are built in batches of a few hundred, and each carries its serial and batch number on the base.