tbg.airframes.io

[thebaldgeek]

New URL, same ACARS centric website.
Thanks for all support. Looking forward to the next chapter of ACARS at the new URL.
Some points about the 'same' new site.

* For technical reasons, the current site is going to be feature freeze. Bug reports/fixes are encouraged, but new features will be held over to a 'v2' version of the site.
* The site search is faster and is the key to the site. There are two text fields on the search page, the Raw ACARS search (multi word, spaces as needed) and the ICAO/Type/Reg/Source. use them combined for powerful search.
* Mission Code search is only looking for terms in the table columns, ie, it does not search the raw ACARS message text. So airport codes, ICAOs etc work best, or simply click on the cell you want to see more history (up to the last month) from.
* Last page in the menu, C_Channel is not really for OSINT just yet, but is there to help build out some interesting new features of the site. More to come, but largely ignore this page for now - if you know what it means, lets chat!

Looking forward to hearing your input on the current site and what you would like to see in the V2 site.

[Eagle130]

Absolutely love this, such a relief to have the site back and really looking forward to getting stuck back into it!

Thanks again for all your hard work in keeping this ship sailing, definitely doesn’t go unnoticed!

[JAWS]

Great to see this site back, it was missed.

Thanks for all your hard work on this tbg.

[sdad]

Just learning here but I can see it is much more useful and usable than before, thank you. Just for now, how do you differentiate between scrolling across the page and changing the column width? I keep trying one and getting the other.

[JPS]

That is a nice post Christmas gift @thebaldgeek! Your website was surely missed when it was down. Keep up the good work

[thebaldgeek]

Just learning here but I can see it is much more useful and usable than before, thank you. Just for now, how do you differentiate between scrolling across the page and changing the column width? I keep trying one and getting the other.

No question that using the site on mobile is tricky.
This is one of the main core reasons why this site is pretty much now feature freeze. The code base that its written on can never be made to be responsive and thus adapt to different screen sizes.
The v2 code base is not responsive yet either, but they say in time it will be, so that will be my focus going forward.

To your question, you really have to mind the part of the screen you put your finger on and drag left/right. Middle of a column is where you want to try and hit.
Not sure what your eyesight is like, but someone on the stream yesterday said to reduce the font size and that can really help as well.

[slogen51]

Nice to see this site back albeit in a reduced form

I personally miss the RAF section and the USAF section as I found it informative and fun to browse the free text messages without focusing on a specific flight - a good example of this were the Acars messages from the last RAF F-35B delivery that diverted to spain.

The INI messages are useful to know where a flight is planning on going but other messages provide stuff about progress and delays,diverts etc

I only use the site on a mobile so am well used to the screen handling idiosyncrasies.

My main request would be for a drill down feature - tap a hexcode and see other messages associated with that aircraft/Flight

I personally don't see the benefit of a live auto refresh and it must be quite difficult to achieve - I personally prefer a snap shot style that I can refresh by simply reselection ot the menu item but that is just me.

But as others have said it is good to see the site back up - for plane spotters like me it is the data rather than the presentation that matters so thanks to you and others I know of for making the Acars messages available to people like me who have no idea about satcomm receivers

Happy new year

[thebaldgeek]

Thanks for the feedback @slogen51 really helpful to see what people like and most of all how they use the site.
One question about your use, at the start of the post you mention that you miss the RAF section, then at the end of your post you mention you did not see the benefit of of a 'live auto refresh'... the question for me is that the RAF section was a live auto refresh! (Very easy to do BTW).
So hence my confusion... you liked it, but did not see the point in it?

One of the reasons I removed it is because people said it often updated too fast for them to read everything (I did not control the update rate, the aircraft message rate did).
I have made the site search a lot faster so people can search areas and aircraft quicker.
My current thought is to somehow allow wildcard searches so you can put in the ICAO range for the RAF and search for all those aircraft which would be just like the old live page, but without the problem of the messages scrolling by too fast.

The drill down idea is one that has been floated a bunch of times and is simply impossible the way the v1 site is built. I am keeping that 'drill down' idea top of mind in v2.

[slogen51]

Thanks

I didn't make myself clear - I don't mind auto refresh but for my purposes ( I stress my as in a single user) I don't need to see up to the second information as I tend to dip in and out of the application but as I say others may leave a window open on a desk top and read all the messages before they scroll away.

The RAF section was of interest to me as I am British so therein lies my interest - it didn't matter that it auto scrolled as there are fewer messages hence less activity under the RAF filter.

I like to copy and paste from your website into FC with credit given and to be honest the auto update often means the selected message moved ( on a mobile) just as you are trying to read / copy it.

Perhaps the drill down could manifest itself as a popup that disappears when tapped?

[thebaldgeek]

Ah, gotcha. Thanks for breaking it down for me.
I have often thought about how a pop up (not an option in v1) could work in, and I like your description.
If I could work in a copy button in the popup, that would really help isolate messages and make them easy to share.

Great feedback. Thanks for your input.

[thebaldgeek]

If any here like listening to the L-Band uplink audio, I just pushed a big update to the L-Band page on my GitHub site.
This update was possible thanks to two guys mentioned at the top of the tables, they have spent untold hours decoding and confirming the frequencies.
The update includes all the voice channels for all the Inmarsats that carry ACARS data.
This will make it a lot easier to setup the VFOs in your SDR software and have Jaero record the audio.

Its a bit of a stretch, but do know that when Jaero records the audio, the aircraft ICAO is in the .ogg file name, so you can set up some software to read this, check if its military and if so, move it or if not delete it.
Thus you will end up with a directory of only military voice calls and what aircraft its from.
Of course, this can be left running so you don't have to be at the computer listening all the time.

I digress.
Here is my GitHub for those that have not seen it yet: https://thebaldgeek.github.io

[Eagle130]

Morning all - not sure if this is just a me problem or not but https://tbg1.airframes.io/ appears to be down. Just being presented with a Node-Red Dashboard on Chrome for Windows and Safari for iPhone.

Not sure if related but I was having some issues yesterday with all the integrated home page monitor graphs showing as 0 too.

Anyone else in the same boat?

[sdad]

Same here, Android.

[Eagle130]

Appears that the site is still down as of 13:30z today (27th March) and the link to the Github page from a few posts above is also down with a 404 error.

Hopefully everything TBG is okay, has anyone else seen any updates anywhere either about the site or TBG himself?

[sdad]

Snippets are seemingly still being posted on here, so what's their source?

[BOLLO]

Snippets are seemingly still being posted on here, so what's their source?

https://app.airframes.io/messages/histo ... t=Ini%2FID

[BOLLO]

Snippets are seemingly still being posted on here, so what's their source?

Read through this thread .
viewtopic.php?f=108&t=232654

[sdad]

Thanks. I remember the advice that ICAO search works. I tried EGUN and found the search button appeared when the keyboard was displayed but can't get it to show any results (on Android) so thanks to you who can make it work!

[diamond chap]

Thanks. I remember the advice that ICAO search works. I tried EGUN and found the search button appeared when the keyboard was displayed but can't get it to show any results (on Android) so thanks to you who can make it work!

Try leaving the ICAO search blank and put EGUN in the text search box instead.

[sdad]

That's much better, many thanks. Obviously, the missing table in more like plain English was also useful but there's a lot to learn here for now.