OpenTrafficMap is an open project run by volunteers. This page covers how to take part, who is behind it, and where to find the code.

The most valuable contribution by a distance. The map can only show live data where a receiver is nearby, so every new location extends what the project can see — and a location nobody covers yet is worth more than a better antenna somewhere already covered.

1. Get a receiver, or build one: Receivers
2. Put it somewhere useful: Placement & Outdoor
3. Name it and put it on the map: Your Node

If you pick up something interesting — a new city, an unusual sender, infrastructure that was not known to be live — add it to Coverage. The conventions for entries and the difference between a documented deployment and a sighting are explained there.

Register a wiki account and edit. Corrections, missing details and new pages are all welcome, and the gaps are marked: search for TODO to find the places where somebody's knowledge is missing rather than somebody's writing.

A few conventions:

• Long pages with sections, rather than many small pages. If something is a paragraph, make it a section.
• Plain, factual language. No marketing tone.
• Say where a number comes from. Measurements, prices and dates age; a source lets the next person check.
• Prefer linking to a repository or a datasheet over copying its content, except where a short summary genuinely saves the reader a trip.
• Images: give them a height of 420 pixels by writing {{:your_image.jpg?0x420|caption}}. The leading zero means “no fixed width”, so the image is scaled proportionally to that height — it is not cropped. Equal heights make images sitting next to each other line up, and uneven widths do not bother the eye. Readers can always click for the full-size original. Only depart from 420 with a reason: a very wide panorama would become wider than the text column, and a picture that is the subject of its page may deserve more room.

Firmware, hardware and the map are developed in the open at codeberg.org/opentrafficmap. The receiver hardware and firmware are described on Receivers; alongside them you will find the decoding side — cits-to-json, a C-ITS parser written in Rust, and cits-wireshark-bridge, which decodes via tshark and produces JSON.

This wiki is written in English. C-ITS is a European technology, the deployments span several countries, and the people building receivers are not all German speakers.

One deliberate exception: the imprint stays in German, because it is a legal text under Austrian law.

OpenTrafficMap is run by a registered non-profit organization, and everyone involved works on a voluntary basis.

Receivers are passed on at cost — we do not make a margin on the hardware. The organization holds a bank account, which is what makes it possible to accept payment for orders and to receive donations at all.

TODO: Donation details — bank account, or whatever channel is preferred — are not documented anywhere. If donations are welcome, this is the place to say how.