ACARS in Calgary area

[Jay911]

Time for a mea culpa:

I said this the other day about what you can do with a tapped scanner -

One of the other neat things you can do is monitor a kind of short message service for aircraft, called ACARS. Search for "acars" and "acarsd" (the latter is a program that can decode ACARS messages) in the forums here for more info. I tried ACARS for a while, but either I'm too far away from the signal (generally close to the airport, obviously) or my tap is too sloppy (like I hinted elsewhere, I didn't bother with a capacitor - just straight wire to tap point).

I completely forgot that AM signals, which ACARS is transmitted on, doesn't go through the discriminator tap. ACARSd runs off an untapped scanner!

Calgary has three freqs for this setup. 131.475, 131.55, and 136.975 are all in the TAFL DB licensed for this purpose. I have had success on 131.55 in my area, hearing from two Jazz aircraft - one going from Calgary to Victoria, another from Calgary to Kelowna, and an Air Canada Airbus going from Toronto to Vancouver. As well, as I'm typing this, a private/general aviation plane just showed up, evidently flying from Seattle (KSEA) to somewhere near here - probably Calgary, but I can't tell. (I looked the aircraft up on FlightAware, but they have asked FlightAware to hide their aircraft!)

You sometimes see some neat info show up on the screen, but a lot of the data is mundane - like local position, weather request, etc. I find myself surprised at the distance I'm picking up the signals - the Kelowna flight reported a position just about right over Highway 8 x Highway 22, but the private plane was about 20km SW of Longview when their messages were received!

And here comes another one, an Air Canada Airbus 319 going from Calgary to Las Vegas.

You guys who have been discussing non-voice comms with me lately should try this out. Installing ACARSd takes a bit of work and you have to fiddle with the volume, but any old scanner with airband capability will work. I'm using a BC72XLT that's of little use to me for anything else right now.

 

[SCPD]

I have failed to get the SD program to work. I am using a different program that works fine. I think its because I'm using a long wire for an antenna. I can get some of the transmissions perfectly fine but others seem scrambled.

 

[Jay911]

Like I said about ACARSd, it's pretty testy. I had to turn the mic input volume on my computer down all the way and the radio volume down pretty much to nil as well. The soundcard volume has to read about 14 on the ACARSd status bar - [Vol: 14|0|0|0].

Also keep in mind the messages might be sent in some kind of shorthand or using keywords to trigger a certain response from the system. It could be lat/long plus fuel state, passengers on board, special services required, etc. Or it could be something plain like "ANY INFO ABOUT CANADIEN/WASHINGTON GAME..."

Are you by chance using PDW? I tried it but never got any satisfaction out of it as far as ACARS messages were concerned.

 

[yyc_tbird_sc]

Keep searching for frequencies with ACARS. I can't give any specific ones out (privacy statement, previous employers, lawsuits, etc), but I can tell you that when you find the ones in/around calgary you'll have a ton of messages flying back and forth.

 

[SCPD]

I have the list from the acarsd site, the AIR canada one is cranking out msg's. As for the program I use, yes that is the one Jay and I agree I'm not very satisfied with its performance for Acars.

 

[Jay911]

131.55 seems to be used mainly by Air Canada, with some general aviation thrown in.

136.85 is also in use, run by SITACOM rather than ARINC. That one has been almost exclusively WestJet with one flight from British Airways popping up on its way from Heathrow to San Diego.

On 136.85 I caught a WJA flight reporting its location (as plotted by me entering the lat/long in Google Earth) 2km ENE of Vernon, BC