Lowe Airmaster 2000 v.1.22 review
Product information
Airmaster 2000 is a demodulator VHF ACARS decoder for Windows operating systems. It is available from Lowe Electronics in the UK. It consists of a demodulator which attaches to a serial (COM) port on a PC, and decoding/logging software. The program supports DDE (Dynamic Data Exchange) and can act as a server for a range of Acars analysis programs, such as Log Analyser, Wacars and AirNav Suite. The price for demodulator and software is STG£89.95 (about €148 or US$129). Postage will vary according to where you live.
Minimum requirements
Windows 3.1x, Windows 9x, Windows Me (Millennium Edition). Airmaster will not work on Windows NT, 2000, or XP. It will not work on any non-Windows computer. Memory requirements are at least 8MB for Windows 3.1, 12MB for Windows 95, and (probably) higher for later versions of Windows.
The application needs less than 700KB 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. They can be zipped up and will take up considerably less space when they are compressed.
A sound card is not needed, as the input from your radio is passed through the demodulator and serial port to the program.
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
Dell Dimension L PC, 933 MHz Pentium III, 256MB RAM, Windows XP Professional
HP Vectra 5/75 PC, 75 MHz Pentium, 8MB RAM, Windows 95 (and DOS)
Also tested on a Dell Inspiron laptop with a 800 MHz Pentium III processor, 64MB RAM and Windows Me;
and on an IBM Aptiva PC with a 333 MHz AMD K6 processor, 64 MB RAM, Windows 98.
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. With the Dell laptop the Bearcat was using its own "rubber duck" aerial near an Acars ground station.
Installation
The program is supplied on a 3.5 inch floppy disk which comes with the demodulator. Run the setup.exe directly from the floppy or from a temporary directory on your hard disk. Reboot after the installation completes (I seem to remember you will be prompted for this).
Use
After installation of the software attach the demodulator to the earphone socket of the airband receiver. Plug the demodulator into a serial (COM) port on the PC. The demodulator has the wide variety of connector, so you may need an adapter if you have narrow COM ports.
The radio needs to be tuned to an Acars frequency that is used in your area, e.g. 131.725 MHz. The volume can be turned up quite high and initially turn off the squelch ("noisy radio"). Now run the program. You will need to set a few settings in the Options -> Setup menu.
The most important item here is the COM port. Click the radio button for the COM (serial) port you are using. The address and IRQ values will be populated automatically. You can accept the defaults for the other settings for now, and come back to them later if you want to edit them.
If the correct COM port has been selected the rectangle in the top right corner of the Live Data window will pulse red and green. Fairly soon, depending on how busy it is up there when you do this, decoded messages start appearing in the Live Data window:
You will probably want to log the data, so open the Options menu, and select the Log Everything To File option under Logging. The other settings shown in the screenshot below are my preferences, which you are welcome to adopt or adapt!
If you select Only One Log Per Day you will be able to have more than one monitoring session in the one day, and have only one log for everything. Otherwise each session will have its own log.
You can see a list of aircraft received by opening the Display menu, and selecting Aircraft List:
This window can be customised using the Options -> List Setup, Highlight Latest, Colours, and Sort Order commands. The list can be sorted by registration or flight number, or not sorted, in which case it will be in date/time order. In List Setup you can specify how many items the list will hold as a maximum, and whether or when it will expire.
When you close the program the log will be saved in the location you have specified, or the default location if you have not changed this. It is then available for analysis.
Updates and support
The version supplied to me in 1999 was 1.22. For all I know this is still the current version. As Microsoft now supplies operating systems which do not support Airmaster, it is not likely that there will be further development of the program. The problem seems to be that it is written to rely on a virtual device driver that is not present in Windows NT type operating systems, of which XP is the latest version.
Lowe Electronics provides support by email. I have had few occasions to contact support, but when I did, I always got a comprehensive reply quite quickly. As Airmaster does not use data files to interpret the aircraft registrations, flight numbers, etc., there is no need to update any data files.
Uninstall
There is no uninstaller provided as such, and you can not use the Windows Add/Remove Programs Control Panel to uninstall the program. Instead, delete the Winacars directory and the files VBRUN300.DLL and THREED.VBX in the Windows System directory. Caution: if you have not backed up your logs from Winacars\Log you will lose them! I keep all my logs in a separate directory outside the Winacars directory. And you may need the VBRUN300.DLL and THREED.VBX for other programs you have installed on your computer, so you are better off leaving them where they are; they don’t take up much space.
Conclusions
When I first started monitoring Acars messages I was using an IBM Aptiva with a Crystal on-board sound card, and a 333 MHz AMD K6 processor, 64 MB RAM, Windows 98. I was using Wacars 0.7, and was getting nowhere fast. This was because Wacars needs a Creative Labs Sound Blaster sound card. The only other sound card-based decoder I was aware of at the time was Kracars, which also did not work for me.
After some discussion with more experienced Acars monitors, I decided to invest in Airmaster 2000, and had immediate and lasting success. Log files are typically of the same size as those obtained with AirNav ACARS Decoder, and a large number of uplinks were received when monitoring 131.725 at Shannon Airport in one test with a Dell laptop.
Airmaster is nearly perfect as a decoder. However, the logs do need to be interpreted. This can be done after they have been created, using Dacars or Log Analyser. Also, because Airmaster can act as a DDE server, the information can be displayed live in Log Analyser, Wacars, PosFix, and AirNav Suite 3.x or 4.
There is one odd bug which I did not come across until I migrated to Windows Me. Sometimes, for no apparent reason, the program just stops decoding. The program does not freeze, but no more data bursts are decoded. The solution is simple enough: close and re-launch the program. However, this makes unattended running of the program (e.g. overnight) unreliable. It does not happen every time I run the program, nor have I established whether it is after a certain length of time or when the log file reaches a certain size. Indeed, it may not even be related to Windows Me, but could be specific to my unique hardware/software configuration. In fact I’d be interested in hearing from other Airmaster 2000/Windows Me users whether they have come across this issue.
My solution to this is to run Airmaster v.3, the DOS version which preceded Airmaster 2000, in DOS on an old HP Vectra with a 75 MHz Pentium and 8MB of RAM. This PC does not have enough memory to run Airmaster 2000, but can handle the DOS version of the program quite well. The only drawback is that the Airmaster v.3 does not save its log each time a message is logged, which means that a power failure will result in total loss of the session’s data.
Because it runs in Windows, Airmaster 2000 is more tolerant of unscheduled computer reboots, in that one can usually retrieve the log by running Scandisk on boot up. It would be somewhat less scary, though, if Airmaster 2000 saved the log file each time a message was logged.
Although I now am able to use sound card-based decoders on the Dell PC running Windows Me (because the sound card is a Sound Blaster), I still prefer Airmaster. It is the most reliable of all the decoders I have come across so far, and would give it seven marks out of ten. It was never intended to be a complete Acars monitoring and analysis solution, and I have no issues with using other programs for the analysis of the logs.
Review written 14 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.
