ACARS
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Contents
Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS)
ACARS data is used to send messages to and from commercial airlines' aircraft. A good explanation can be found here.
The frequencies used in the United States for ACARS are:
129.125 129.350 129.525 130.025 130.450 130.825 131.125 131.425 131.550 131.850 136.575 136.650 136.700 136.750 136.800 136.850
These frequencies may be used in some areas:
136.675 Delta and Jet Blue 136.725 Delta 136.775 Air Canada, Air Transat, American, Delta, JetBlue, United
- For ACARS questions, please post them on the Aircraft Monitoring Forum.
- Rockwell Collins/ARINC ACARS page
Operating Tips
- In general, all that is necessary to hook up a receiver and PC to receive ACARS is a good shielded connection from the speaker or earphone of the scanner to the soundcard. A discriminator tap is not required, since it is not involved in AM reception
- There's a brief sync tone sent before each transmission; if the software doesn't receive it, no decoding will occur. Most scanners' squelch cannot open up fast enough, so keep the squelch off. There are, however, a few scanners that do open up fast enough; these include:
- Win108
- Yupiteru VT-125/150
- Yupiteru VT-225/MVT-3100
- Yupiteru MVT-7100/7200
Decoding Solutions
Links in bold are known to be compatible with certain SDRs such as the RTL-SDR, either directly or piping audio via applications like Virtual Audio Cable
For other RTL-SDR solutions, see the Big List of RTL-SDR Supported Software. Some of the packages listed here may work with other SDRs
- ACARSdec
- ACARS Pad For Iphone, Ipad or IPod Touch
- acarsd
- Airnav
- Hoka Code 3-32
- KG-ACARS
- MultiMode (MAC systems)
- MultiPSK
- PDW
- PlanePlotter
- rtl_acars_ng
- SkySpy
- Sorcerer
- Winradio Digital Suite
- Winradio Advanced Digital Suite
Mailing Lists
- acarsd Yahoo group
- ACARS on QTH.Net
- ACARSlogs on QTH.Net