129-137 MHz
ACARS
The text messages crews and airlines send each other over VHF: position reports, fuel figures, technical faults and free text.
ACARS is the older of the two VHF datalinks and still the busiest in most of the world. Each message names the aircraft registration, the flight number and the label saying what kind of message it is, and the body is often plain enough to read without a manual.
WaveShark reads it across the data half of the airband rather than on one channel, so a message on a company frequency you did not know about is caught with the rest. Messages land in the message view and the link view, and are written down a file a day.
Checked against acarsdec on the same recordings.
What comes out
- Aircraft registration and flight number
- Label and block id, which say what kind of message it is
- The message text, where the airline sends it in clear
- Downlink or uplink, and the station that sent it
$ waveshark --tune 131.55 --mode am --messagesRead next
Something did not decode?
Record the burst with --record and open an issue with the capture. A capture that decodes becomes a test fixture.
Open an issue