thebaldgeek

Added WDG, Wardrive Go and Biscuit sections (more to flesh out in those): Aug 2026 This wardriving blog (and every blog written by thebaldgeek on this site) is AI free. tbg is NOT a writer and DOES NOT use AI to fix/enhance/repair/create or any other automation to write his dumpster fire way of sharing raw info. Topic menu Why wardrive Links and resources tbg vs Kismet GPS Android Phones Phone Placement WigleFin v1.0 Wigle App Settings Scanning all the Wi-Fi wifydra WiGLE app scan speed setting CPU Throttling BLE Scanning impacts Wi-Fi? Programming the Signal Sleuth Building the Signal Sleuth Shorten your coax cables SMA torque wrench SMA and Reverse SMA tbg madness mods to the Signal Sleuth (WDUK) It really matters where you put the LNA Yagi vs panel (high gain Wifydra build) Planning and driving a wardrive Radiation driving Antenna gain - good thing or bad? thebaldgeek finds wardriving very relaxing and a great way to explore the world. Be it just a few blocks around where you live,...

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...