AirNav ACARS Decoder v.1.0 and 1.1 review
Reviewed by Jacob Struben
Please note - a new version (Version 2) of the AirNav ACARS decoder has been released by AirNav Systems. A review will follow shortly.
Product information
AirNav ACARS Decoder (usually referred to as ANAD) is a sound card VHF ACARS decoder for Windows operating systems. It is available from AirNav Systems, LLC, a Portuguese-owned company run by Andre Brandao. The download page is on the AirNav site, while purchase of the registration key is through RegSoft in the United States. Registration costs US$49.95 (about €56 or £35 Sterling). The Decoder is complementary to AirNav Suite v.4, which is an analysis and flight tracking tool. The latter can take inputs from ACARS decoders, other programs (e.g. HFDL and Selcal decoders), from an Internet data source, and manual inputs.
Minimum requirements
According to AirNav the Decoder will run on Windows 95, 98, Me (Millennium Edition), NT (presumably NT4.0 is intended here), 2000, and XP. As it is a 32-bit application, it will not run on Windows 3.x or NT3.x systems. AirNav say that ANAD may run on a Macintosh using a PC emulator.
The application needs about 1 MB of disk space for the installation. Log files will vary in size depending on how often the Decoder is run and your location, radio/aerial setup, etc., and you obviously should take into account that the log files will take up some space. The good news is that they can be zipped up and will take up considerably less space when they are compressed.
You will need a sound card on your PC. The AirNav documentation does not specify what sound cards do and do not work, and the only sound card that worked for me with ANAD is a Creative Labs Soundblaster. This result may be due to the fact that ANAD did not work at all on the other two computers used to test the program, and AirNav have toldl me that the program does work with other sound cards.
And you will need a VHF airband receiver to capture the ACARS data bursts!
Test environment
Dell Dimension L PC, 933 MHz Pentium III, 256MB RAM, Windows Me, Creative Soundblaster sound card
Dell Dimension L PC, 933 MHz Pentium III, 256MB RAM, Windows XP Professional, Creative Soundblaster sound card
Also tested on a Compaq Presario 1200 laptop with a 600 MHz Intel Celeron processor, 32MB RAM and Windows 98 SE, and a Via Technologies on-board soundcard;
and on an IBM Aptiva PC with a 333 MHz AMD K6 processor, 64 MB RAM, Windows 98, Crystal on-board sound card.
In all these configurations the receiver was a Uniden Bearcat BC100XLT hooked up to a half-wave dipole aerial in the attic of a two-storey house. A Yupiteru MVT-7100 attached to the same aerial was also tested.
Installation
Installation is straightforward, and involves nothing more than unzipping the downloaded zip file to an empty directory, and then running the setup.exe program. No reboot is required after installing the application.
Use
I run ANAD successfully in Windows Me on the Dell PC with the Sound Blaster card. In Windows XP Professional, on the same PC, the program installs fine. However, when attempting to run v.1.0, it freezes the entire system. ANAD v.1.0 is the only program known to me that is able to freeze Windows XP! ANAD v.1.1 was released to fix this (see Updates and Support below).
In Windows Me I have had good results with ANAD, and since installing the v.1.1 fix it also works fine in Windows XP. Its use is fairly simple. All one needs to do is to turn on the VHF receiver (once it is connected to the sound card via the Microphone or Line In socket), tuned to one of the known ACARS frequencies for your area (I test with 131.725 MHz as this is the busiest frequency in my area), and launch the programme. At the start it is probably a good idea to monitor one frequency only, with the squelch turned off, i.e. a "noisy" radio. ANAD shows a bar indicating the strength of the noise/signal received. If nothing shows in this, go to the File menu, and select Start/Stop Decoding. While this sounds confusing, it is a toggle, so each time this is selected, it switches to the other state.
If nothing happens, you will need to configure your sound card through the Windows Volume Control panel. ANAD, quite cleverly, gives you access to the recording and the playback Volume Controls via the File menu (select Sound Card Settings and then Recording or Playing). It will be in the Recording control that you will need to adjust settings. If configuring this gives you no results, try switching the radio input lead from Microphone to Line In or the other way around.
All being well, you will now see the level of noise/signal being received. If you have a compatible sound card, the program will start showing decoded messages in the main window (Text Log). The other two windows (Live ACARS Grid and Flight List Grid) show summaries of the main log. You switch between windows by clicking on the tabs at the top of each.
The above image shows the Text Log window active. I usually run ANAD maximised as there is usually a fair bit of information to be displayed. The screenshots below show the Live ACARS Grid and Flight List Grid:
The log of all the messages, including the full text of each, is saved each time a new message is received. This log can be imported into recent versions of Log Analyser, or ANAD can act as a DDE (Dynamic Data Exchange) server for Log Analyser, which means Log Analyser takes in the data in real time. The message log can also be imported into DACARS for analysis. As DACARS is an MS-DOS program, it cannot import data in real time.
Other DDE clients which can use inputs from ANAD are PosFix v.2.0 and AirNav Suite v.4 (and versions 3.x). Wacars can be configured to take inputs from ANAD, but unfortunately it cannot cope with the format in which the messages are passed, which results in the registrations being truncated (e.g. HZ-ANA becomes HZ-AN, which is pretty useless). In fairness, Wacars predates ANAD, and has not been updated for some time now. PosFix allows you to choose whether you want the input from ANAD to be filtered or not, which fixes this registration truncation issue.
The Flight List and Live ACARS grids can be sorted by each of the columns, such as Last Date/Time, Registration, Type, Flight Number. The Flight List grid can also be exported to a text file, which yields a report similar to the report produced by DACARS:
This report was after a monitoring session using the Yupiteru MVT-7100; the Bearcat BC100XLT does not receive 136.925 MHz properly.
This example is in Last Date/Time order, but can be in registration or flight number order also. These summary reports are often used for distribution by email, or can be uploaded to personal websites, as they are only a few kilobytes in size (at busy monitoring stations they can reach maybe 50 KB).
One issue I have with this report is that it does not flag new registrations or flight numbers. DACARS marks new registrations and flight numbers with an asterisk, which is very useful for quickly identifying such new items. Log Analyser goes one better by providing a table of unique reg/flight combinations, as well as one of unique registrations. These can be sorted by date, thus allowing the user to see quickly whether any flights have been heard operated by aircraft not previously heard on that flight, as well as whether new aircraft have been picked up. ANAD reporting does not provide any of these features, and therefore must be considered to be primarily a decoder, rather than an analysis/reporting tool.
The aircraft types and flight routings are taken from ANAD’s internal database, which can be edited by the user. Entries can only be added, deleted, or edited one by one.
Once you have success with monitoring one frequency, if you have a suitable scanner you can now scan all the ACARS frequencies in your area.
One issue I have come across is that, when left running beyond midnight in Windows Me, the PC freezes at that point. This is a pity as a busy time at my location is between about 4 and 10 a.m. When invoking the Windows Close Program utility (Ctrl+Alt+Del), one program listed as not responding is msgsrv.exe. This does not happen every time, but too often for reliable overnight running. In a recent overnight test in Windows XP this problem did not happen.
Another minor gripe is that when closing the program, it often gives an alarming Windows error message. However, fortunately the main message log is saved each time a new message received, so the unclean termination of the program will not normally lead to data loss.
Updates and support
If you have v.1.0 and cannot run it in Windows XP, use the fix for Windows XP compatibility issues which was issued in March 2002. The fix consists of a new .exe file which is placed in the ANAD directory, overwriting the existing .exe. (You can also download the entire v.1.1 program if you want to do a complete re-install.) This upgrades ANAD to v.1.1, but you still need to tell Windows XP that you want to run ANAD in Windows 98/Me compatibility mode. Right-click on the program icon (e.g. on your desktop or in the ANAD directory in Windows Explorer) and select Properties. Select the Compatibility tab and tick the Compatibility mode box. Windows 98/Windows Me can be selected from the dropdown menu, and if that does not work, try Windows 95.
On my XP system ANAD v.1.1 now works:
This fix does not deal with the incompatibility with Wacars.
No data file updates are available, but the database can be updated manually by the user. An alternative to this is to use ANAD as a DDE server for AirNav Suite v.4, which has databases that can be edited in Notepad. Also, these databases can be updated using data files available on the Acarslink website. And AirNav Suite v.4 can display information from a Wacars-compatible. database (also available on Acarslink). This means spending an extra US$69.95 (approx. €79 or STG£49), for which you do get extra functionality. If you are a registered AirNav Suite v.3.x user, you can register v.4 for US$59.95.
Andre Brandao provides support by email. I always found Andre’s support to be helpful and reasonably quick, whenever I needed support for AirNav Suite v.3.1 a few years ago. However, there has been a lot of discussion over the last number of months about a lack of response from Andre to requests for support. This is an issue that should cause concern to anyone selling software, as I doubt that many people are willing to pay for software as long as there is a question about the after-sales support the vendor is willing or able to give. I have been told by Andre that the turnaround time for email queries is now less than 10 hours. This hopefully will correct the poor reputation that AirNav support has acquired recently.
Uninstall
There is no uninstaller provided as such, but you can use the Windows Add/Remove Programs Control Panel to uninstall the program.
In Windows XP the item remained in the list of installed programs (in the Control Panel) after performing an uninstall, so eventually I had to use a utility called Remove 2.0 to get rid of it completely.
Conclusions
When it works, it works well. It is the best sound card based decoder I have come across, and easily out-performs Wacars 0.7. Kracars does not work for me at all. However, out of four PC/OS/sound card configurations I have tried, it only works with two: Dell Dimension/Windows Me/Sound Blaster and Dell Dimension/Windows XP/Sound Blaster. Even then, it cannot be left running unattended past midnight in Windows Me, while this issue requires further testing in Windows XP. AirNav have told me that they had not come across this issue until they read a previous version of this review.
On the other hand, when used with PosFix or AirNav Suite ANAD is a powerful visual tool.
Log files were typically about the same size as log files obtained with the same radio/aerial configuration, using Air Master 3 in MS-DOS on a 75MHz HP Vectra VE5/75 PC.
On the Compaq laptop and the IBM Aptiva PC I have tried, both with on-board sound "cards", I get no results and/or the program freezes.
The supplier’s ability or willingness to provide support has been questioned recently, but AirNav say they have put measures in place to deal with support queries within 10 hours.
No method of updating the proprietary database exists, other than manually entering, deleting, or correcting data. The only alternative offered by AirNav at present is to buy AirNav Suite v.4.
Based on these considerations, I would give this program six out of ten marks for decoding, and five out of ten for the overall package, and will continue to rely on Lowe’s Air Master demodulator, while looking forward to testing new improved versions of ANAD whenever they are released.
Review written 23/24 March 2002, and updated 21 April 2002. All the opinions expressed in this review are the author’s (Jacob Struben), and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the website owners. Any errors of fact are the author’s, and corrections are welcomed by email.
