thebaldgeek

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...