Call signs on tbg.airframes

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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 source) will have a call sign in it.

Once I have an ICAO/Reg and call sign, I put it in a separate column in the central database (sqlite).
Every table on every page, as well as the main site search, uses this master database.
If there is a match, I display the call.

Before we get to the call formatting, v1 of the site held onto the call sign until the next call sign for that ICAO showed up, sometimes that could be days or even weeks in the case of some Military airframes.
Not anymore. Now I have a hard-coded 6-hour timeout (delete/drop) of stale call signs.

BTW, 6 hours was chose due to the sites central focus of oceanic flights. ADSB flights are not part of the website.

Ok, so once we have an ICAO found in the database and need to display the call sign for it, I format the call sign source as follows:

F:MC5429 F is for 'Flight'. This is for those ACARS sources (mostly satcom (L, C, and IRDM) that explicitly call out the 'flight' and the call sign used for this flight.


CVL:RCH827 in this case, the same call was seen in C-Band, VDL2, and L-Band.


VL:RCH635 In this case, the same call was seen in VDL and L-Band

V:RCH2052,F:MC2052. In this case, the first call was seen via VDL, and the second call was seen in a 'Flight' ACARS message.
F:MC1890,CVL:RCH1890 here, the first was seen in a 'Flight' ACARS, and the second was caught in a C-Band, VDL, and L-Band.

Not very common, but yes, I have seen flights with three 'different' call signs.
I leave it to the site's users to determine what they all mean and what value or data they can extract or use from them.





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