ACARS
ARINC Communications Addressing and Reporting System

 

Frequencies Monitored (MHz)
131.550
130.025
129.125
130.450
131.125
136.700
136.800
136.900

 

ACARS is used by most of the major commercial airlines to facilitate "non-real-time" and definitely "non-vital" (no safety of life stuff) communications such as position reporting, airline gate assignment, special instructions, crew information,etc. For more on ACARS, try ACARS Online, ARINC Presentation on ACARS system and new VDL Mode 2 Systems, or this nugget ACARS-SITA.

 

For the hardcore among you, the ACARS specification is available here, where you'll find the over-the-air protocol in the document ARINC Report 618-5, Yours for only $208US. Note that all the specs for the entire system are for sale here.

 

 

The N7UV ACARS station is no longer in operation due to other interests that needed the radio receivers, but during the 18 months or so that it was running, it was a 24/7 operation, monitoring the busiest ACARS channels in the southwest. It employed two Radio Shack Pro-2052 scanners to scan a total of 8 VHF-AM channels.

 

If you want to take advantage of the data that's generated by the dozens of ACARSd-powered servers around the world, you can download ACARSclient which will allow you to watch ACARS traffic at many locations around the world, including my server. Look for acars-phx.dyndns.org in the server list. And, if you don't find it, type it in manually.

The daily flight log is available from the ACARS-PHX server.

 

Once you have ACARSdClient running, if you choose to watch traffic in the Phoenix/central Arizona area the map here may be useful for you. Other interesting data as well as all the archived daily station logs are here.

 

 

 

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Copyright © 2008 Jon Trent Adams
jon (a t) jonadams.com