thebaldgeek

Added 'jump menu': Sept 25th 2025 Added radiation driving section: Oct 1 2025 Jump menu Why wardrive Links and resources tbg vs Kismet GPS Android Phones Phone Placement WigleFin Scanning all the wifi wifydra Scan speed setting CPU Throttling BLE Scanning impacts wifi? Programming the Signal Sleuth Building the Signal Sleuth tbg madness mods It really matters where you put the LNA Yagi vs panel (high gain build) Radiation driving thebaldgeek finds wardriving very relaxing and a great way to explore the world. Be it just a few blocks around where you live, or the planet. Seeing the ebb and flow of the density of WIFI access points gives him a bigger world view and a touch of humility that he appreciates. Of course, there is also a baldgeek aspect to the hunt, the RF side of building a rig to capture as many SSIDs as you drive down any given length of road. tbg is fascinated by the idea that it's unknowable. No matter how much you tweak your setup, did you get them all? Is th...

Some people don't care even a little about callsigns, while others are aware of their significance in military missions and civil routes, but can use them or not. Some individuals have urged me to enhance my decoding and display of call signs across the site, as they primarily use call signs to track flights. What follows is roughly how I extract call signs and, more importantly, how I display them in the tables on the site. There are five sources for callsigns, ie all the ACARS feeds to the site: VDL2, L-Band, C-Band, HFDL, and Iridium. For each source, I use different methods to try to extract any calls in any of the possible types of messages. For example, there are approximately 14,000 different structured VDL ACARS messages, so I have to work my way through which one of those 14,000 the current one is and where the call might be. Less of an issue with L and C, and as for Iridium... don't get me started about Iridium.... I do my best. Not every ACARS message (true for any s...

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...