ACARS msg parts

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 been calling rego). But not in the official formatting. has a . and missing -
3. Flight ID
4. Callsign

C-Band

Here is a random military C-Band message.


Here is what I think. These are questions, not facts.
1. ADSB/ADSC Hex
2. MSN (ie, what I have been calling rego). Odd formatting. Has a . and is missing -
3. Flight callsign

Another C-Band since there is so so so many variations of these.


Here is what I think. These are questions, not facts.
1. ADSB/ADSC Hex
2. MSN (ie, what I have been calling rego). Odd formatting. Has a . and is missing -
3. Flight callsign
4. Flight ID
5. Flight callsign

This is solid proof that I have no idea what I am doing and clearly am not making best use of all the information in many of the ACARS messages that flow through the site. (In case you missed it, I have 3 and 5 both called the same thing, but they are not the same information.)

Ok, I showed the L-Band and C-Band so I could show you Iridium - still the blogs main focus subject.

Iridium



Showing a bunch of these so you can get the feel for just how pseudorandom they are.
Two issues here. There is no consistent header, and second, often they are fragments of some well known ACARS message structure. (The fragment aspect is a blog for another time).

The only 'header' information I have to work with is in the code.
In my case, that means Node-RED, but that's not important. The data is formatted in JSON, also not super important, but this is an example of what I see 'behind the website'.



As you can see, really the only ID is the 'tail'
This was the subject of the previous blog, there is NEVER a - (hyphen) in the 'tail' data field of the iridium ACARS
But, hyphens are used in the ADSB community database. Hence me wanting feedback on me wanting to remove them - or hide them - from the website.

tl;dr Each SATCOM ACARS source has different useful parts.
Iridium has 'none'. The tail of iridium can not be currently matched to any ADSB database data field.

Comments

  1. USAF VIP LGXMarch 9, 2025 at 7:17 PM

    I think this will be a hard “re-write” of the site. As you showed even between the source there is different items. Your example is from a C-17. Now do the same type of example from a C-32. Your results will be different and even less input data. There you don’t get a MSN but the real registration number, etc.

    On the L-band, I am a registration number person. #2 & 3 tell me nothing.

    C-band, the first example, again, #2 & 3 are useless.

    Second example get someplace. #2,3,4 are again useless being a regno person. #3 doesn’t help especially if listening to ATC, it’s only a partial callsign. So #1 & 5 are the only useful items.

    Everyone searches and used differenlty. I sharing how I use and look at the results. I’m no expert on any of this, just pickup what I can make from it but I don’t think there is a generic catch all to reformat as you would like. I maybe missing the point too or not fully undertanding it either.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. PaulMarch 10, 2025 at 7:30 AM

      Re Iridium, I don't understand what you mean when you say there is "never" a hyphen in the tail code (In the latest (libacars)toolkit it's called reg - I assume it's the same)
      {"err": false, "crc_ok": true, "more": false, "reg": ".EI-LRF", "mode": "2",
      {"err": false, "crc_ok": true, "more": false, "reg": ".EI-NSB",

      Ok, how do I post a screenshot?

      Delete
    2. tbgMarch 10, 2025 at 9:15 AM

      USAF VIP, can you let me know if you get a ping on my reply here? I'm wondering if folks will know if I reply to their comments they leave.... Thanks.

      To your comment... I've always sort of known that everyone uses my site different and for different reasons, but I had assumed that folks would use the core parts that never change, I'm quickly seeing that's not the case!
      In my usual desire to make the site useful to EVERYONE I am going to try and include MSN, reg and hyphens where they make sense.

      Delete
    3. USAF VIP LGXMarch 10, 2025 at 5:21 PM

      I did not login to my google so no alert to a reply.

      Delete
  2. tbgMarch 10, 2025 at 9:17 AM

    @paul. I am not sure that comments can include images / screenshots. Text only.
    Sorry. I needed a blog platform that allowed anonymous comments, it was hard enough to find one that worked for that, not sure allowing screenshots was on my 'blog platform search criteria' hit list.

    ReplyDelete

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