Feed ACARS Drama with ADSB.im — a step by step guide
The ACARS Drama engine is a glutenous beast. And now, thanks to ADSB.im, you can join the global effort to feed it.
In the latest version of adsb.im, you can very quickly spin up a remote feeder.
ADSB.im is an all-in-one feeder image for single board computers, that allows you to leverage an SDR to feed multiple different types of aggregators for different RF protocols, including, the ACARS Drama engine’s two favorite snacks, ACARS and VDLM.
This software, along with a couple of pieces of hardware, is a very quick and easy way to get started. For this guide, I shall use a Raspberry Pi 4 ($80–$100ish, I think, at least for a new Pi 5) and an RTL-SDR ($30).
Here’s how:
- Download the image for your platform from adsb.im: https://adsb.im/download — in this guide, we’ll use a Rapsberry Pi, but there are various other options on the list as well.
- Extract the .img file, and then use an appropriate technique to apply the image to your SD Card. The adsb.im documentation recommends using the official Raspberry Pi imager to image the image to your Pi, which makes a lot of sense of course. The imager also gives you the option to set your Wifi creds for easier access after the image is installed.
- Select ‘use custom’ and browse to the .img file you just downloaded from the imagers menu.
4. Once you have written the image to your machine, connect to in a web browser, and you’ll see the ADSB.im setup page.
Give your feeder a station ID (something Unique, that includes the ICAO code of the nearest major airport is always appreciated), and select ‘None (no-ADSB)’ from the ADS-B feeder options. Hit Submit.
6. Once the image does its thing — scroll down to enable the non-ADSB containers. Here you can choose to enable two ACARS containers or VDLM2, it all depends on how many SDR’s you have connected to your Pi, and your geography. The ACARS Drama Club discord is a good place to discuss what might work best for your location.
In this example we’ll set up our SDR to work with a single ACARS container. So click on enable next to ACARS decoder, enter your feed ID and the frequencies you wish to scan — 131.550 is the ‘default’ ACARS frequency but there are various others. Note that you don’t have to actually enter any if you are unsure, as defaults will be used.
Next step is to assign your SDR to the ACARS Container. On the SDR Setup Page, you can see which SDR’s are connected to your board, and choose the one you wish to assign. In this case, I just have the one SDR to attach.
In gain, I use -10 as the value, which means automatic gain control.
Once assigned to ACARS you’ll see the following. Hit ‘Apply Settings’
7. Go to ‘Data Sharing’ where you can elect to send the data to the Drama engine.
Hit ‘Apply Settings’ Once Again.
8. That’s it, if you like, fire an email to feeders@acarsdrama.com with your Feed ID and approximate location, we’ll confirm we see the feed in our data.
9. You can also send VDLM2 data or another ACARS feed using the same steps as above. You can also choose to send to other ACARS projects from the list as well!
A huge thank you to the adsb.im project for including ACARS Drama in their latest image.
