MY ACARS SET UP

I live in a two storey town house and have an old Dick Smith VHF antenna on the roof. It's about 4 years old now and I can't see it on the Dick Smith Electronics website so I guess it's been discontinued.

To attach to the roof I just lowered the TV antenna down a bit on it's mounting pole and then attached the VHF antenna to that. I guess that from an interference point of view it's less than ideal but as I'm renting this place I didn't think the owner would like me drilling another antenna attachment point to his roof!

In early 2000 I lived in Wanneroo (about 40km north of Perth Airport) and had the antenna attached to the roof there. Due to the distance from Perth airport I'd only get stuff down from aircraft until they descended below about one thousand feet.

From October 2000 to April 2001 I was in Broome (About 2000km NNE of Perth!) and unfortunately never got around to setting up ACARS due it being the wet season. With all the thunderstorms around I was convinced that if my set up didn't get blown apart by lighting it would probably get blown off the roof by one of the two cyclones that went past whilst we were there! I now wish I had set it up because with all the stuff overflying Broome and Derby on the way to/from the east coast of Australia and Europe it would probably have been one of the best places in the country to have an ACARS set up!

Now that I'm here in Bayswater (5 km's north of Perth Airport) I get stuff from aircraft at the international terminal whilst they are on the ground as well as stuff from aircraft just after touch down. The only 'blind spot' I seem to have now is when aircraft are at the domestic apron. I guess that this is because the domestic terminal is directly between me and the aircraft so the transmissions don't get through.

Radio wise I have an old Sony ICF2001D. This is probably the 'weak link' in my set up. I borrowed someone else's scanner for a month whilst he went away and the range I could pick up transmission from increased a fair bit. I also got a few more transmissions from the domestic apron. Maybe one day I'll get around to buying something a bit more modern!

In my spare time when I have nothing to do I have a website designing company. As part of this I have an old P3 600 set up running server monitoring software for a client of mine. This machine is also my ACARS computer as it's on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week (apart from 3 minutes early each morning when it reboots automatically - otherwise it falls over after a few days!!)

The machine runs Windows ME - the main reason for this is that I can run Skyspy on it. I've tried to set it up so that the scanner is as far away from the computer as possible but I really need to get a longer cable so I can move it further away. At the moment the scanner is about a metre away from the computer but it's right next to the screen although this isn't really a problem as the screen is off 99.9% of the time.

For data analysis I run a program designed by a friend of mine here in Perth called Acars Analyser. It's still in a state of continual development but works well.  (I run Acars Analyser on my main Windows XP machine and just query the Skyspy database via my network) You can also do searches for specific data such as flight numbers or aircraft etc etc. See http://www.cosmic.com.au/acarsanalyser/ for more details.

On the image below you can see the 'New registrations' to Perth since I last reset the list and in this screen I've also got the 'summary of aircraft since you last looked' open which shows you all the aircraft that have been heard since you last looked at the list.

There is also provision to look at all aircraft in the last 24 hours, 48 hours, 7 days and last month. As you can see on below we've had 159 ACARS equipped aircraft into and out of Perth in the last month using 191 different flight numbers.

In early June 2004 I wrote a visual basic script that enables people to view Perth ACARS data in real time as well as to search the databases I have dating back to August 2001. This facility is online at http://perthacars.no-ip.org:8050/acars/

I have Windows Server 2003 installed on one of my machines and this machine acts as the live ACARS server. Every time someone views the live ACARS page the script checks the Skyspy database and shows the last 30 records.

I have numerous separate databases containing historical data from 2001 through to now. When a search is conducted on historical data the appropriate database is searched based on the search date.

The live ACARS system also sends out a summary log to the Yahoo groups ausacars & oz-spotters automatically at 0001 WST each day listing the flights for the previous 24 hours.

Hope this has been of interest to you. If anyone has any suggestions, comments or queries feel free to email them to acarscomment@cosmic.com.au