thebaldgeek

June 22nd Update. The L-Band feed from 98w is back up and running. Just leave my C-Band 98w feed to go. Making great progress restoring all the ACARS feeds. June 18th Update. Most feeds are now back up and running. Managed to keep the main big outage down to about 3.5 days. (Was up working on the feeds at around 3:30am after 4 hours sleep). L-Band Americas is still down for a few more days and C-Band is still more than a month out, so those two are right as expected.  It's not you - it's me. This is a 'planned' outage. Additionally, please note that since the central computer storing the ACARS messages is also not receiving the feed data, all messages during this time will be lost . If I had to guess, I'd say that the feeds will be down for about a week. More bad news. Because a few of the satcom feeds (C-Band and L-Band) are set up via a relay computer, some feeds will not be making it to airframes.io That said, your best bet to see ACARS messages during the outage...

thebaldgeek here. I've had in mind to do some podcasts and YouTube's videos on ACARS and once getting the format a bit settled, I've wanted to open it up and do some 'interview' style media and have guests on the 'show' to talk all things ACARS. A bit like the old X (Twitter) Spaces 'Fireside chats' (Or as was often the case, fireside rants), but slightly calmer and more structured. But the end goal was the same. I want to connect users and osint folks that use ACARS to really dig into and take flight tracking to the next level via ACARS. Since this blog has been running for a few months, the idea occurred to me to open it up and feature some guest blogs from time to time. And so here we are. Mike, aka @ElbaSatGuy and I have been DM'ing for what must be years (cant scroll back that far to find the first one!). Mike drives a big rig / truck / semi (in Australian) / 18 wheeler. He affectionately calls it his 'mobile sigint platform'. He ope...

I have a strong interest in UAV's (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle aka drones). I built and flew radio controlled aircraft for many years in Australia, did custom avionics builds for many 1/4 scale aerobatic RC aircraft and custom built and repaired racing drones here in California for a few years. Having this strong interest made adding a single button that recalls a list of ADSB UAV hex codes to my trackmap page a no brainer. This blog post builds on the one I posted a few weeks back on the  ADSB community database (that YOU maintain), but also ties in how the mictronics database 'type' field can be used. I started building the list on V1 of my website, sometime around the end of 2021 as I can see I was looking for UAV hex codes here around  Feb 2022 on Twitter . BTW, Evergreen Intel is now mostly active on @vcdgf555.bsky.social as is Amelia Smith @ameliairheart.bsky.social The list was quickly fleshed out by using the 'type' field in the community database. I found the...

Let's now take what we learned from my last blog (about the tar1090 based sites using the mictronics airframe database) and see how to apply that knowledge to the current situation of the E-6 aircraft not showing up as usual on ADSB tracking sites. Please keep in mind that once again, my constant droning on and on about this statement is as true as ever: I'm too busy building and running the site to use it. In other words, I see my role as helping folks understand subtle things about OSINT aircraft tracking that from a pure observing point of view have largely gone undiscussed in the past. And for sure no one has been able to bring in the ACARS aspect of tracking ever before. Said another way, I try and keep up with what folks are talking about in regard to ADSB/C aircraft tracking and help them understand the data and how to tie in ACARS data to assist if possible. @neetintel X spaces. I happen to listen for a few minutes to neet's spaces stream and they commented on how ...

 I do NOT maintain the community (ADSB) airframe details database - You Do. Ever since I built version 1 of my ACARS website some seven years ago, I have pretty consistently received messages indicating that one of the ICAO hex, registration, or type details on my site is incorrect. (One gent about 5 years ago, very memorably sent an extremely angry message reporting how one (obscure) airframe had the wrong details and if it was wrong, then NOTHING on my site could be relied on to be accurate and so I was forcing him to not just stop using my site, but he felt it was his duty to warn every other avgeek he knew away from my site. The interesting thing for me is that he clearly only wanted to report it (complain about it) he never asked how it could be updated / corrected. This was my first and only interaction with this chap - I did not reply; he made his point clear, and he was right, the airframe in question was wrong - on mine and every other tar1090 website at that time). This ...

 Super rough brain dump of some of the process of re-using some of my old satnogs antenna / LNA hardware on a tinyGS. Satnogs has lost their way for a while now. Just flakey software and an overall bloated experience. I wanted to press the UHF and VHF antennas into use, so figured I'd move my single tinyGS from its V-Dipole to the UHF antenna and spin up a new receiver for the VHF antenna setup.  (This has the nice side effect of freeing up two raspberry pi's, two RTLSDR V3s and some assorted cables for ACARS work). The UHF antenna has a built in LNA, so the current Bias-T that is powering it remains. Just a matter of moving the ESP receiver from the V-Dipole coax to the end of the Bias-T. I'm not too interested in tweaking it any more than its current setup. Easy to see when the move took place in the packet count graph. The coverage heat map looks healthy enough, so we are done here. thebaldgeek_433 tinyGS The 137Mhz setup took a tiny bit longer because of my interest lev...

 While this blog is not directly about ACARS, I'd still like to share some of what I've read and mull over. Hope you don't mind or at least find some of the information / thought process a little provoking. Preamble Part One If you have been following my X account for more than a year, you may recall some backlash I received for attempting to use AI in ACARS message decoding. I took the 'feedback' (angry and negative that it was) and kept working on it in private. (I do a LOT of ACARS work offline.) I've been discussing using ML/AI/LLM in ACARS with Mike @ElbaSatGuy via DM quite a bit, and we hope to have more to share at some point (visit his X stream to see screenshots if you're interested). Mike's effort and thought process about its use case with ACARS mirrors mine and my thoughts around AI. We both want to use it to filter and tame the firehose of ACARS messages. To aid in their decoding, filtering and display. Preamble Part Two I'm very upfron...

 The wait was worth it. The crew at https://shop.airframes.io have really done an amazing job with this antenna mount. Backing up just a bit and sort of repeating a bit more of what's already on my GitHub Iridium page , but this time, we are just talking about antennas for Iridium. Over the years I've easily tested about 8 to 10 antennas and 3 SDRs and a lot of combinations of them. I guess an exhaustive blog should really photograph and list model numbers... And if the results had been close or nebulous in any way, IF that were the case, then yes, I would be listing everything I've tried and would be asking for sanity checks left and right. But, as you can probably tell, there was no uncertainty; we have a rock solid clear 'winner' in the Iridium antenna world. The winner first.... The HC610. Small in size, beast in Iridium ACARS. Let's see some of who else was in the race... The UFO and 'the stick'. Both about the same. The UFO was active. The stick, ...

UPDATE: 6 hours and 8 minutes of downtime. All three sites are back up and running.  For once, the website is down not because of me or my 'code', but it seems that the VM host is down. How do I know? Because all three websites are down. The main site, tbg.airframes runs on Node-RED, that one is on me. Thats the dumpster fire we all know and love - 200 ish users per day. tbgmap.airframes is tar1090, nothing to do with Node-RED at all, and it's a Docker container. About 30 people per day use that one. tbgacarshub.airframes is JavaScript, again, nothing to do with tar1090 or Node-RED and again, it's a Docker container. About 5 people per day hit that one up (5 makes me a bit sad, but eh). For all three to be down, it means that the host is down. The final 'proof' is that I can't shell (Linux terminal session) into the virtual machine (VM). It's no secret that I am hosted by Contabo.  They went down a few months back for about 2 frustrating days. Why frustr...

I've started to take a closer look at the custom ADSC and Iridium registration list of airframes I've been building over the past 5ish years. 563 airframes. 206 of which are tagged as military. Here is my question.... If you look at my blog about the database structure I was proposing, I was going to have the one database entry per airframe and load up all the new columns with the different ways that airframe can be identified by ACARS from its avionics. This would mean that my code has to search all the columns to see if there is a match anywhere for both the new incoming ACARS message and for any site searches that the users might do. After looking at the list, I'm now rethinking this idea.... I'm now thinking that each ID option should have its own entry in the database. The clearest way to show a 'for example' is with the ADSB vs ADSC hex. AE2925;162782;E6;10;Boeing E-6B Mercury;AE040D;; So here the ADSC hex has been added by me in the 'year' field ...

 A fellow avgeek in Ireland read my 'Death the hyphen. Long live the hyphen!' blog and reminded me that he and I exchanged DM's a few years back at our mutual frustration of those registrations that have a + in them. I had totally forgotten, but it all came rushing back like a bad dream. Indeed, what a pain in the site search page they are. What should we do fellow agveeks? The scope of the problem. I did a quick and dirty search of the ADSB community database the site uses (reminder, the mictroncis one): "select reg from airframes where reg like '%+%';" I got 281 results. A quick screenshot of some random returns: And if you hit the site search, some show up, some don't. Here is one that did. BTW, this is a really big part of why I have the 'you searched' section at the bottom. It doubles as an airframes look up. Did you notice that? Drop a comment on this blog either way. I've actually had a DM from a site mega power user about how this ...

Ok. Its decided. As mentioned in the last blog: Death to the hyphen. Long live the hyphen! That said. Here is what is currently in the mictronics database. Note, its a CSV, comma separated variables. It goes something like this; ADSB hex;      REG:     ICAO  type;      mil/civ;      description;      year;      owner AE1BAB;167926;C30J;10;Lockheed Martin KC-130J Hercules;;; AE1BEB;07-1468;C30J;10;Lockheed Martin C-130J-30 Hercules;;; Two examples at random. One with a hyphen in the reg and one without. Note also that some airframes records have all the details, some have some bits missing. That's not important. Also unimportant is how I have been (ab)using the year and owner fields for ADSC hex and iridium registration data. That's what's going to change. Lets break it out for the blog; ADSB hex: AE1BAB . We all know what this is. My site uses this first. REG: 167926 or 07-1468 . Most know these...

 <sigh> I mean, if it was not for the previous blog rant, I would not have dug into the issue and found the problem. (Well, one of the very many problem's with the site). So there is value in setting me off into rant mode - just be sure to get out of the way and don't take anything I say while in said mode personally. I'm mostly ranting at myself. Honestly, the real question is how in the world do so many of you avgeeks put up with this dumpster fire of a site and the beat up scrappy ally cat that is its mascot? (Honestly, could you get a more accurate image of my website than this?) Actually, one of you kindly gave me the answer to that in a DM overnight... let me anonymously quote.. "And also I have to say thank you very much for being so comitted to ACARS, your website (together with Airframes) has been the biggest step forward in Aircarft tracking in the recent years." Man, that just about brings a tear to my bald geek heart. Ok, back to the title and su...

I've seen this effect time and time again over the years with the computer work I've done right across the board.... If you include an example screenshot, the reader becomes hyperfocused on the screenshot and deprecates* all my words or the plead to look at the big picture of what I am trying to say. Case and point. There are 3-4 (Depending on how you count it) versions of the Iridium toolkit in use. Two of them are not compatible with the the other two in many ways. Two of them are annoyingly close. Every feeder will calmy state they are using 'the latest' and the version can be hard for the feeder to find. Updating the feeder is very tricky for most - then you have 2 docker versions floating around which do stuff with acars router (or not). The result of that mess for me is that my site has code on the Iridium feeder input that tries to auto detect and convert all 4 versions into one usable version for the site. (I really should annoy Kevin more and find out how the b...

I got some feedback on my Iridium rego blog. (1 comment and 1 DM - a rant for another time, but it seems that 80% of folks that use my site are happy to not help, 19% only complain and 1% actually help me build it - its a hard slog for me with those numbers, but its been that way since year zero). Two main aspects to the feedback. 1. What I call rego is actually an MSN. Manufactures Serial Number. The serial stays with the airframe for life. I think I want to go site wide and rename all the tables from reg or rego to MSN Thoughts? 2. It was suggested that I use the ID in the ACARS messages to set the MSN. This is now pretty much the topic for the rest of this blog. Lets look at the 3 main SATCOM ACARS sources and see what they look like and what you all can tell me about them and how I might use the data to build the site airframe database. L-Band. Here is a random military L-Band message. Here is what I think. These are questions, not facts. 1. ADSB/ADSC Hex 2. MSN (ie, what I have be...