A pilot with CAL FIRE: one unit, one season, your screens.
It does not detect fires. It reads aircraft, and it says what it cannot know. Not on a real phone yet: every ATAK capture so far is ATAK-CIV on an emulator. Not tested: iTAK. Committed with a test, not yet seen on a client: attack bases as a layer; the ATAK AERIAL pane is exercised by board tests only, not yet by a live read; LMBS reaches TAK as a link marker to this page.
Live only where we poll: up to — centres, each — nm across, placed on active CAL FIRE incidents first and then the largest fresh hotspot clusters, plus our own receiver’s one footprint. That is not the whole state, and a centre the community feed did not answer says nothing about the sky over it. Within that reach, it goes live when a fleet aircraft is within — km of a polled hotspot or an active CAL FIRE incident, from our own receivers and community ADS-B (adsb.lol contributors, ODbL). Otherwise it replays earlier passes and says how long since the last live one. Attitude is INFERRED. The name is ours, not a callsign, and it hides nothing: the track itself is public.
The satellite sees heat; CAL FIRE lists fires. This map shows heat that is not on the public list yet, ranked by how much it looks like a fire. Every candidate is unconfirmed until CAL FIRE lists it, and most heat is not a fire.
How far ahead, measured: of — alerts so far, — were later matched to an incident on CAL FIRE’s public list. An alert counts as matched when it lies within — km of the listed location, and each alert is credited to a single incident. The radius is a convention: at — km — leads resolve, at — km —. For — of them the lead is resolvable at the list’s — s poll interval: median — h before the listing, longest — h. That is a lead on the list, not on the fire: where the incident carries one stated start, our alert came after that start in — of —, by — to — h. The list showed those same incidents a median of — h after their stated start (over —). That is a small n, and a lead on the public list is not a lead on dispatch: CAL FIRE dispatch routinely knows first.
A fire officer with a phone has a hundred cameras and a minute. For each active perimeter we sample exits around its boundary, score each outward bearing, and name the optics whose published position sits near it — each one a link to that camera on its operator’s own site. It answers where to look first. It does not say where the fire will go.
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| Flight | Class | Operator | Airframe | Alt ft | Dist km | Brg | Elev | Slant | Kt | Seen | OH | Nearest incident |
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— CAL FIRE position broadcasts heard so far. Whether each pass was near a fire is read separately, pass by pass.
The honest number: — alerts had an aircraft this receiver could see. The rest did not.
Of — alerts, — had aircraft overhead in the window; — were within reach of the reload base.