Acars ?

[wink]

Can someone Please Explain to me what Exactly is ACARS, what its used for and what kind of Software , computer, or Scanner one would need. Does it Track Aircraft using your computer and scanner? Sorry if its yet another DUMB question but i had to ask.

 

[z96cobra]

Check out the aircraft monitoring forum just a few links down from this one for more detailed info. Basically ACARS info is sent from the aircraft back to the airline/ATC with info from the aircraft such as current position, current status (aircraft diagnostics, ETA), and stuff like that. The pilots can also request info from the airline/ATC over it also. Most of the stuff you'll see requested is for gate assignments, wheel chairs upon arrival, weather info and stuff like that. Sometimes you'll see weird/funny stuff like jokes, messages to other people/pilots, and even requests for the score of whatever big game is playing at the time.

www.acarsd.com is where you can get some good software for free.

Roger

 

[nd5y]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACARS

 

[fuzzymoto]

Interesting stuff. So you use a scanner to lock on to this channel (or channels) and then the audio is decoded by the acarsd software on your computer?

What sort of interesting stuff do you see? Is this available anywhere or only within the range of an airport or antenna? Does this show positions of airplanes? Aren't there websites that offer tha same info or am I confusing flight tracking with ACARS?

Thanks...very interesting stuff.

 

[morfis]

Interesting stuff. So you use a scanner to lock on to this channel (or channels) and then the audio is decoded by the acarsd software on your computer?

Yes

What sort of interesting stuff do you see? Is this available anywhere or only within the range of an airport or antenna? Does this show positions of airplanes? Aren't there websites that offer tha same info or am I confusing flight tracking with ACARS?
.

Whether any of it is interesting depends rather a lot on personal interests!
Yes, available pretty much anywhere as an aircraft at 30K feet has pretty good radio range. If you look at HFDL as well as ACARS then the ranges are considerably greater.
Some message types contain position reports which can then be plotted.