Call signs on tbg.airframes
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...