Every helicopter over your neighborhood, counted.
HeliTracker is a small listening device that hears a helicopter coming, matches it to the actual flight, and writes it down. What used to be a complaint is now a record.
- Loudness
- 78 dB
- Altitude
- 1,100 ft
- Today so far
- 11 flights
The problem with helicopter noise is that nobody is counting.
Operators say traffic is light. Residents say it is constant. Without numbers, every conversation with a town board, an airport, or a charter company goes nowhere. HeliTracker gives your side of the table the data.
Hears them, day and night
A weatherproof microphone listens continuously. A sound model trained on thousands of aircraft recordings recognizes rotor blades and ignores trucks, lawnmowers, and jets.
Names the flight
Each detection is checked against live flight tracking. Most passes come back with a tail number, an operator, an altitude, and a heading. Not a guess. A named aircraft.
Keeps the record
Every event lands in a log you can share: a phone alert the moment one passes, a history you can scroll back through, and a spreadsheet you can hand to officials.
Built on the Long Island Sound. Running since spring.
The first HeliTracker unit sits at a house in Westchester County, under one of the busiest charter corridors between Manhattan and the Hamptons. It has been logging every pass, around the clock, through storms and heat waves, with a hardware watchdog that restarts it if anything hangs.
Each pass is logged with its altitude above the ground, its loudness in decibels, and its route across the sky, so the record shows not just how many, but how low and how loud.
What a morning looks like in the log
Each row is one helicopter passing over the device. This is the same format that goes into the app and the export your community group can bring to a meeting.
| Time | Duration | Confidence | Aircraft | Operator | Altitude AGL | Heading |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 06:58:41 | 31 s | 0.91 | Sikorsky S-76 | Charter | 1,200 ft | NE |
| 07:14:05 | 44 s | 0.96 | Bell 407 | Charter | 900 ft | SW |
| 07:42:13 | 38 s | 0.94 | Sikorsky S-76 | Charter | 1,100 ft | S |
| 08:03:57 | 27 s | 0.88 | Airbus H130 | Tour | 1,400 ft | NE |
| 08:21:30 | 52 s | 0.97 | Sikorsky S-92 | Charter | 800 ft | SW |
| 08:47:12 | 22 s | 0.83 | No transponder match | Unknown | Unknown | Unknown |
Sample rows shown for illustration; the full record also carries tail number, callsign, loudness, heading, and position. See every field. Live data from a running device is available on request.
It fits on a windowsill. It runs itself.
The device is a small computer with a microphone and a power cord. You put it somewhere outside-facing, plug it in, connect it to Wi-Fi, and it starts listening. There is no camera, no video, and no cloud recording of sound. Only the moment a helicopter is recognized gets saved: a timestamp, how long it lasted, how confident the model was, and which flight it matched.
Everything after that is software. The phone app shows a live feed, sends a notification within a minute of each pass, and lets you scroll back through the day, with every pass drawn on a map. All of it is built and maintained by MNR Developers.
Read the full technical breakdown
The next one is already on its way. This time it gets written down.
One device, one subscription, and your neighborhood has something it never had: numbers.