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GLENSHANE PERSONAL COMPUTER USERS GROUP |
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GLENCOM NEWSLETTER |
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Volume 7 Issue 7 |
July 2000 |
| NEXT MEETING | |||||||||
| The next meeting is on Monday 17th July 2000 @ 8pm. | |||||||||
| CALLING ALL ACARS | |||||||||
| You
may have heard that amateur radio is not as it was the good old days.
Way back then enthusiasts built their own equipment or adapted surplus
military or commercial equipment. These days, you will hear many say,
there is no longer any challenge.Whilst classic amateur radio has gone,
new opportunities exist, take for instance ACARS. ACARS What exactly is ACARS anyway? ACARS (Aircraft Addressing and Reporting System) is a digital data link system transmitted via VHF radio which allows airline flight operations departments to communicate with the various aircraft in their fleet. A group of enthusiasts specialising in the interception and interpretation of ACARS transmissions meet on the internet. Using only a radio receiver and your PC's sound card, the appropriate software will interpret and display the data. http://patriot.net/~acars/index.htm ACARS transmissions often contain the aeroplane's position, so it is possible to plot in real time their flight paths. I HAVEN'T GOT A RECEIVER No problem - there is a piece of innovative software called AIRNAV which will automatically download flight data in semi-real time from the internet and display the planes on your screen in a manner very similar to air traffic control. Since the data is on the internet you are not limited to radio line of sight, you can watch planes worldwide. NO ONE ELSE CAN SEE Some of the more remote airports in Africa don't use radar. The tutorial accompanying AIRNAV explains you have a complete view of aircraft where Kinshasa, Libreville, Bangui, NDjamena, Luanda and other African ATC Centres work at night. This is a interesting because you are perhaps the only person to really 'see' this traffic since these centers do not use radar or any Simulation Software to track aircraft. You can download AIRNAV Internet Lite from http://www.airnavsystems.com/ The larger version of AIRNAV allows simultaneous Radio and Internet monitoring. It even has a feature allowing you to spot aircraft 'near misses'! ACARS IN MORE DETAIL This VHF digital transmission system, used by many civilian aircraft and business jets, can be likened to "email for airplanes," as the registration of each aircraft is it's unique address in the system developed by aeronautical radio giant ARINC (Aeronautical Radio, Inc.). Traffic is routed via ARINC computers to the proper company, relieving some of the necessity for routine voice communication with the company. With ACARS, such routine items as departure reports, arrival reports, passenger loads, fuel data, engine performance data, and much more,can be requested by the company and retrieved from the aircraft at automatic intervals. Before the advent of ACARS, flight crews had to use VHF to relay this data to their operations on the ground. The ACARS system is comprised of the following elements: 1. The Airborne Subsystem, onboard the aircraft, which consists of the: a.) Management Unit Receives ground-to-air messages via the VHF radio transceiver, and also controls the replies. b.) Control Unit is the air crew interface with the ACARS system, consisting of a display screen and printer. 2. The ARINC Ground System, which consists of all the ARINC ACARS remote transmitting/receiving stations, and the ARINC computer and switching systems. 3. The Air Carrier C2 (Command and Control) and Management Subsystem, which is basically all the ground based airline operations such as operations control, maintenance, crew scheduling and the like, linked up with the ACARS system. Messages can be categorized in two ways: "Downlinks" which are those ACARS transmissions which originate in the aircraft, and "uplinks" are those messages sent from the ground station to the aircraft. |
Email
Address for Life Members - please help Glencom find you, sign up with Bigfootand we'll aim all your ONEList traffic at it. That way you won't miss the traffic, or the Glencom Newsletter no matter how often you change your ISP. Visit Rootsweb WorldConnect
to see if your name is up there
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| SMS CONFIRMATION | |||||||||
| The
question was posed the other day about the Mobile Phone Short Message
Service (SMS) - how do you know if your SMS was received? On BTCellnet at least there seems to be a solution, begin the SMS with the following three characters: *0#. For example: *0#Will you be joining us at the monthly meeting on Monday? If the recipient's phone receives the message Cellnet will send you a rather obscure SMS saying in effect that the message was received. G |
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| eGROUPS | |||||||||
| The word on the street is that eGroups who started out life as ONEList, and who host our virtual club meeting have in turn been swallowed up by Yahoo. G G | |||||||||