ACARS Online

Reviewed by Jacob Struben

Product information

Bart Hoekstra’s Dacars is essentially an Acars log viewer and reporting tool. The name may derive from the fact it runs in DOS. A demo version can be downloaded from the author’s website, and for a small amount of cash he will send you a registered, fully functional copy. The current prices are: €15, STG£10, or US$20.

Minimum requirements

This DOS program will run on any PC (what used to be known as an "IBM compatible PC") with MS-DOS 2.1 or higher.

The application needs about 200 KB of disk space for the installation and needs some 400 KB of free memory to run. If you save the output files you will need space for that. A typical daily text report could be up to 100KB in a really busy location. The dbf reports will not be much bigger.

The only other requirement is that you have logs to input into the program. These should be labelled logs in the Airmaster standard format. Programs capable of producing such logs include Airmaster (2.0, 3.0, 2000), Wacars, Kracars, AEA, and ANAD.

Test environment

Dell Dimension L PC, 933 MHz Pentium III, 256MB RAM, Windows Me
Dell Dimension L PC, 933 MHz Pentium III, 256MB RAM, Windows XP Pofessional

Also tested on an IBM Aptiva PC with a 333 MHz AMD K6 processor, 64 MB RAM, Windows 98.

Installation

Installation is straightforward, and involves nothing more than unzipping the downloaded zip file to an empty directory. A batch file for starting the application is included. This batch file resides in the same directory as the application, and you can make a shortcut to this batch file on your desktop and/or in your start menu. Dacars needs to be configured when you run it for the first time. Run the batch file and the program will open in a DOS box. Press the F1 key to open the configuration window:

This shows the configuration I use. Note that I have specified that the logs and *.dbf and *.txt report files are not in the application directory (which is D:\Dacars on my system). The reason for this is that I have a policy of keeping data and application files separate, for fear of losing data when I update or reinstall a program.

An alternative configuration is where you copy all the Dacars installation files to the /log directory of your Acars decoder. You still need to specify the location of the logs and where the reports are going to be stored in the configuration window.

The other configuration options are self-explanatory. It is worth checking whether your logs use the US or British date format and configuring Dacars accordingly, otherwise you will probably get odd results.

Use

Once you have configured Dacars and hit the escape button to go back to the main window, you should see a list of logs (provided you have logs in the specified directory):

You select a log to view by pressing the up or down arrow on your keyboard. This is a DOS programme without mouse support, so all the navigation is done with the keyboard. Once you have selected a log, press the <enter> or <return> button, and after a bit of work (depending on the size of your log) the program shows a window like this:

The text messages for each flight are shown when the registration or flight number is highlighted. The messages from a single flight can also be seen by pressing the <enter> button when the required flight is highlighted:

These can be printed out or saved to a text file. Pressing the <escape> button brings you back to the previous window. If you now press F12, you can filter out the flights and registrations you have recorded previously:

You can also configure this "Hot list", for example by adding registrations you are particularly interested in, like your national airline’s fleet, or military registrations (the default list has military registrations in it already). To edit the Hot list, press shift+F12. When you have finished viewing the holt list, you press F12 again to go back to the previous window.

If you then press the <escape> button it will bring you back to the main window. The program will ask you to confirm whether you want to exit from viewing the log. At this stage you can view the report in Notepad, or Excel (if a *.dbf file was created). There will be a count of how many flights, how many new registrations, and how many new flights were recorded. The new registrations and flight numbers are marked with an asterisk, and it is a good idea to check that they are valid registrations or flights. There is some good basic error checking in Dacars, but things will slip through.

You can delete any errors by pressing F9 for the list of flights ever recorded, or F10 for registrations. Alt+S allows you to search for a specific item:

You can then delete the faulty record by pressing the delete button.

As I mainly use Dacars to create reports for posting on local aviation and Acars mailing lists, these are the functions of Dacars that I use most often.

Updates and support

Dacars is in version 2.5(b) at present. This version was released in November 2001. Future developments may include making it portable to Windows and Linux, and possibly other operating systems as well. This is very much a long-term goal, though. Updated data files (aircraft.dbf) are posted weekly on the ACARS Online website, courtesy of Nick Birrell. Replace your current aircraft.dbf file in the Dacars directory with the new one.

Bart Hoekstra provides support by email. On the few occasions when I needed assistance I have always found his support helpful and prompt, and I understand that the Acars monitoring community is happy with Bart’s support.

Uninstall

There is no uninstaller provided as such, but you can simply delete the Dacars directory or the Dacars files. Make sure you have backed up your data files (reports) though, otherwise you will lose them as well!

Conclusions

This is a mature program which does what it sets out to do without fuss and without errors. The only errors the user has to cope with are caused by incorrect data in Acars logs, which are usually the result of incorrect decoding (due to weak signal or an error by the decoder). Sometimes of course the Acars transmitter on the plane or at the ground station sends out wrong data. Dacars does not accept any registrations or flight numbers which contain lower case letters or special characters (e.g. *, ?, @). This basic error checking eliminates a certain proportion of wrong registrations and flight numbers, after which some manual checking is necessary.

There are obviously limitations in the program, one of which is that it does not interact with any other program, such as an Acars decoder, via Windows’ DDE (Dynamic Data Exchange). The simple reason for this is that the program runs in DOS. Any future Windows version presumably will work in real time, as messages are received.

Support is readily available to all registered users. The cost of the program is very reasonable.

Based on these considerations (on a "does it achieve what it promises to achieve and is it easy to use?" basis), I would give this program eight out of ten marks.

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Review written 22 May 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.