Who is flying overhead?

 Especially since the July 4th flooding. There have been a lot of helicopters in the sky over my neighborhood and a lot of posts on NextDoor and Facebook asking, "Who is up there?" So here is a quick guide to finding out.

Planes and Helicopters

Start off by going to https://www.flightradar24.com/2025-08-05/22:44/20x/30.58,-97.96/14.

Where: 

2025-08-05 is the date you saw the aircraft in year-month-day format.

22:44 is the time you saw it in 24-hour format and the UTC timezone (add 12 hours for PM times and another 5 hours for Central Daylight Time, summer, or 6 hours during Central Standard Time, winter)

20x is the zoom. 20x is a good starting point.

30.58,-97.96 is the GPS to center the map on. (This is my neighborhood.)

14 is the zoom level. 14 is a good start for things overhead. If you are looking closer to the horizon, you will probably want to go to 11, which shows a wider area.

Click the play button to see the animation. It then turns into the pause button.

Once you see a likely aircraft, hit pause. Click on the craft's icon for info about it.

You can then click on "Route" to view the entire flight path.

Entering the tail number (R20045 in this example) in the search probably will return nothing because it is a military helicopter. So I'm using N3010X instead to show what a non-military aircraft would yield.

Clicking on that results gets you the history of its recent flights and basic info.

Sometimes adsbexchange.com has better info, though it is not as user-friendly. The equivalent URL for it would be. 

https://globe.adsbexchange.com/?replay=2025-08-05-22:46&lat=30.430&lon=-97.933&zoom=11.0

Clicking on the military helicopter provides a bit more information.

Clicking on FULL DETAILS provides more information.

Drones

Drones are supposed to be using transponders now, too, but I would not count on them. You should see them on FlightAware, but I haven't seen any listed anytime I've looked. There are also apps that seem not to work well, according to reviews, and insanely expensive devices from Air Sentinel and DroneTag. Dedrone will not even disclose the price without contacting a salesperson, which usually means OMG pricing. Going DIY with an SDR dongle seems reasonable unless you are having issues with drones flying without IDs. Plus, that could give you a logging option that many of the others lack.

Another attempt at a quick paste response to "I want something with good night vision"

Best color night vision is Hikvision's ColorVu G2s. If you want IR night vision there are more options. I prefer Dahua or JideTech myself but many use the same larger sensors. For IR get the largest sensor you can. 1/1.8 (like Dahua IPC-HFW4631H-ZSA) of better if you can. Forget about stated LED ranges since you will want to turn those off anyway unless you like attaching bugs to your cams. Use seperate lighting like accent lights or IR floods mounted away from the cams.

Plus of course match the specs to the distance and view angle you need. But keep in mind most fixed focus cams are focused for 10-30 feet, depending on model, so for over 50 feet plan on something you can focus for the target range either motorized (usually zoom models only) or manually. Don't assume fixed model are easily adjusted as most are glued in place these days.

What ever you get make sure they support ONVIF or at least RTSP so you can mix brands as needed.

To dig deeper look at https://securitycam101.rmrr42.com/2020/05/getting-cam-specs-easy-way.html for info about how to use an online GUI tool tha lets you set up virtual cams on your site to get an idea of what diff models will be able to see.